‘Yes, I admit that. But isn’t that exactly what you want to make general? There doesn’t seem to me any difference between giving a bounty to one industry and imposing a protective tariff in favour of another; and if your preference for Irish manufactures means anything, it means a sort of voluntary protection for every business in the country. If you object to the Robeen business being subsidized you can’t logically try to insist on mine being protected.’ It was puzzling to have the tables turned on him so adroitly. Hyacinth was reduced to feeble threat. ‘Just wait a while till the nuns get another four thousand pounds, and perhaps four thousand pounds more after that, and see how it will affect you.’ Mr. Quinn smiled. ‘I’m not much afraid of nuns as trade competitors, or, for the matter of that, of the Congested Districts Board either. If the Yorkshire people would only import a few Mother Superiors to manage their factories, and take the advice of members of our Board in their affairs, I would cheerfully make them a present of any reasonable subsidy, and beat them out of the market afterwards.’ There was another influence at work on Hyacinth’s mind which had as much to do with the decay of his patriotism as either the gardening or Mr. Quinn’s logic. Marion Beecher and her sister were very frequently at the Mill House during the spring and summer. There was one long afternoon which was spent in the marking out of the tennis-ground. Mr. Quinn had theories involving calculations with a pencil and pieces of paper about the surest method of securing right angles at the corners and parallel lines down the sides of the court. Hyacinth and Marion worked obediently with a tape measure and the garden line. One of the boys messed cheerfully with a pail of liquid whitening. Afterwards the gardening was somewhat deserted, and Hyacinth was instructed in the game. It took him a long time to learn, and for many afternoons he and Marion were regularly beaten, but she would not give up hope of him. Often the excuse of her coming to the Quinns was the necessity of practising some new hymn or chant for Sunday. Hyacinth worked as hard at the music as at the tennis under her tuition, and there came a time when he could sing an easy tenor part with fair accuracy. Then in the early summer, when the evenings were warm, hymns were sung on the lawn in front of the house. There seemed no incongruity in Marion Beecher’s company in passing without a break from lawn-tennis to hymn-singing, and Mr. Quinn was always ready to do his best at the bass with a serious simplicity, as if it were a perfectly natural and usual thing to close an afternoon’s amusement with ‘Rock of Ages.’ Hyacinth was not conscious of any definite change in his attitude towards religion. He still believed himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father’s prayers.