his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with
increased confidence:

"One sometimes wants to have it out with another man. The police
won't allow it in the streets--and then there's the County
Council--and in the fields even nothing's allowed but posters of
pills. But in a gentleman's garden, now----"

The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: "Do
you want to fight? What do you want to fight about?"

MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an
instinct common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of
Europe had guided him. He knew that the kind of man who in his
own back garden wears good clothes and spoils them with a bad hat
is not the kind of man who has an abstract horror of illegal
actions of violence or the evasion of the police. But a man may
understand ragging and yet be very far from understanding
religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs might comprehend a
quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards or even
escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful
whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake
instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia.
Even MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong
point), felt the necessity for some compromise in the mode of
approach. At last he said, and even then with hesitation:

"We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as
that."