The Christian Candidate regarded his son with a mixture of contempt and apprehension. He despised his lack of business ability, and he viewed his intellectual opinions as the wilful caprices of a sulky and disagreeable temper. It was as a sort of pitying concession to the whim of a lunatic that Mr. Wone was now assisting Philip in planting these absurd geraniums. His own idea was that flower-gardens ought to be abolished altogether. He associated them with gentility and toryism and private property in land. Under the régime he would have liked to have established, all decent householders would have had liberal small holdings, where they would grow nothing but vegetables. Mr. Wone liked vegetables and ate of them very freely in their season. Flowers he regarded as the invention of the upper classes, so that their privately owned world might be decorated with exclusive festoons. “I shall go round presently,” he said to his son, “and visit all these people. I see no reason why Taxater and Clavering, as well as the two Andersens, should not make themselves of considerable use to me. I am tired of talking to these Leo’s Hill labourers. One day they _will_ strike, and the next they _won’t_. All they think of is their own quarrel with Lickwit. They have no thought of the general interest of the country.” “No thought of your interests, you mean,” put in the son. “With these others it is different,” went on Mr. Wone, oblivious of the interruption. “It would be a real help to me if the more educated people of the place came out definitely on my side. They ought to do it. They know what this Romer is. They are thinking men. They must see that what the country wants is a real representative of the people.” “What the country wants is a little more honesty and a little less hypocrisy,” remarked the son. “It is abominable, this suppression of our Social Meeting. You have heard about that, I suppose?” pursued the candidate. “Putting an end to your appeals to Providence, eh?” said Philip, pressing the earth down round the roots of a brilliant flower. “I forbid you to talk like that,” cried his father. “I might at least expect that _you_ would do something for me. You have done nothing, since my campaign opened, but make these silly remarks.” “Why don’t you pray about it?” jeered the irrepressible young man. “Mr Romer has not suppressed prayer, has he, as well as Political Prayer-Meetings?” “They were not political!” protested the aggrieved parent. “They were profoundly religious. What you young people do not seem to realize nowadays is that the soul of this country is still God-fearing and religious-minded. I should myself have no hope at all for the success of this election, if I were not sure that God was intending to make His hand felt.” “Why don’t you canvass God, then?” muttered the profane boy.