'What is it, my dear?' Mrs. Marston looked over her spectacles, and her eyes were like half moons peering over full moons. 'That there picture! They'm hurting Him so cruel. And Him fast and all.' 'Oh!' said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, 'that's nothing to get vexed about. Why, don't you know that's Jesus Christ dying for us?' 'Not for me!' flashed Hazel. 'My dear!' 'No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be tormented.' 'Needs be that one man die for the people,' quoted Mrs. Marston easily. 'Only through blood can sin be washed white.' 'Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any's got to die; I'll die for myself.' The old gabled houses, dark and solemn with heavy carved oak, the smart plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church towers and the pointed insinuating spires--all seemed to listen in surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one thing--vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat folk may get his soul in a cheap form, it is all built up on sacrifice of other creatures. 'What'd you say if Ed'ard died for yer?' queried Hazel crudely. 'My dear! How unseemly! In the street!' 'And what'd I do if Foxy died for me?' 'Well, well, Foxy's only an animal.' 'So're you and me animals!' said Hazel so loudly that poor Mrs. Marston flushed all over her gentle old face. 'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine--'I do hope, my dear, you'll become more Christian as time goes on.' 'If Foxy died along of me,' said Hazel stubbornly--for, although grateful for the festive meal, she could not let her basic rule of life slip--'if Foxy died along of me, I'd die too. I couldna do aught else.' 'Things are very different,' said Mrs. Marston, flustered, flushed and helpless--'very different from what they used to be.' 'What for are they, Mrs. Marston?' But that question Mrs. Marston was quite unable to answer. If she had known the answer--that the change was in herself, and that the world was not different, but still kept up its ancient war between love and respectability, beauty and mass--she would not have liked it, and so she would not have believed it.