Mr. Romer felt strong and confident as he looked down on all these things. He always seemed to renew the forces of his being when he visited this grass-covered repository of his wealth and influence. Leo’s Hill suited his temper, and he felt as though he suited the temper of Leo’s Hill. Between the man who exploited the stone, and the great reservoir of the stone he exploited, there seemed an illimitable affinity. He looked down with grim and humorous contempt at the noisy crowd thus invading his sacred domain. They might harangue their hearts out,--those besotted sentimentalists,--he could well afford to let them talk! They might howl and dance and feast and drink, till they were as dazed as Comus’ rabble,--he could afford to let them shout! Probably Mr. Wone, the “Christian Candidate,” was even at that moment, making his great final appeal for election at the hands of the noble, the free, the enlightened constituency of Mid-Wessex. Romer felt an immense wave of contempt surge through his veins for this stream of fatuous humanity as it swarmed before his eyes like an army of disturbed ants. How little their anger or their affection mattered to him--or mattered to the world at large! He would have liked to have seized in his hands some vast celestial torch and suffocated them all in its smoke, as one would choke out a wasp’s nest. Their miserable little pains and pleasures were not worth the trouble Nature had taken in giving them the gift of life. Dead or alive--happy or unhappy--they were not deserving of any more consideration than a cloud of gnats that one brushed away from one’s face. The master of Leo’s Hill drew a deep breath and listened to the screams of the merry-go-round. Something in the strident machine made him think of hymn-singing and mob-religion. This Religion of Sentiment and Self-Pity with which they cloak their weakness and their petty rancour--what is it, he thought, but an excuse of escaping from the necessity of being strong and fearless and hard and formidable? It is easier--so much easier--to draw back, and go aside, and deal in paltry subterfuges and sneaking jealousies, veneered over with hypocritical unction, than to strike out and pursue one’s own way drastically and boldly. He folded his arms and frowned. What is it, he muttered to himself, this hidden Force, this Power, this God, to which they raise their vague appeals against the proud, clear, actual domination of natural law and unscrupulous strength? Is there really some other element in the world, some other fact, from which they can draw support and encouragement? There cannot be! He looked at the lowering sky above him, and at the grey thistles and little patches of thyme under his feet. All was solid, real, unyielding. There was no gap, no open door, in the stark surface of things, through which such a mystery might enter.