"That is true, my son," said Silas.
"Jane is well?" Paul asked, after an instant's pause, breaking off the profitless discussion.
"Very well."
"And Barney Bill?"
"He upbraids me bitterly for what I have said."
Paul smiled at the curiously stilted phrase.
"Tell him from me not to do it. My love to them both."
They shook hands again, and Paul drove off in the motor car that had been placed at his disposal during the election, and Silas continued his sober walk with his committee-men up the muddy street. Whereupon Paul conceived a sudden hatred for the car. It was but the final artistic touch to this comedy of mockery of which he had been the victim.... Perhaps God was on his father's side, after all—on the side of them who humbly walked and not of them who rode in proud chariots. But his political creed, his sociological convictions rose in protest. How could the Almighty be in league with all that was subversive of social order, all that was destructive to Imperial cohesion, all that which inevitably tended to England's downfall?
He turned suddenly to his companion, the Conservative agent.
"Do you think God has got common sense?"