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He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word ‘pity’ is used as loosely as the word ‘love’: the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience

For a moment until I realized what had happened, I was - disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought ‘now the anxiety begins, and the pain’, but when I realized what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.

The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together -a hocus pocus. He went out of the box and knelt down again, and this too was part of a routine. It seemed to him for a moment that God was too accessible. There was no difficulty in approaching Him. Like a popular demagogue He was open to the least of His followers at any hour. Looking up at the cross he thought. He even suffers in public.

‘She couldn’t stand your stupid, unintelligent ... you don’t know what a woman like Louise thinks.’

‘I don’t suppose I do. Nobody wants another person to know that, Wilson.’

Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different; but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat - that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God. And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created.

He felt no jealousy, only the dreariness of a man who tries to write an important letter on a damp sheet and finds the characters blur.

You never knew in a search what you would find. A man’s bedroom was his private life. Prying in drawers you came on humiliations; little petty vices were tucked out of sight like a soiled handkerchief. Under a pile of linen you might come on a grief he was trying to forget.

he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly - he didn’t seem to expect one reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being.

At the beginning of his service Scobie had flung himself into these investigations; he had found himself over and over again in the position of a partisan, supporting as he believed the poor and innocent tenant against the wealthy and guilty house-owner. But he soon discovered that the guilt and innocence were as relative as the wealth. The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capitalist, making a profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living rent free herself.

‘But do you really, seriously, Major Scobie,’ Dr Sykes asked, ‘believe in Hell?’ ‘Oh yes, I do.’ ‘In flames and torment?’ ‘Perhaps not quite that. They tell us it may be a permanent sense of loss.’ ‘That sort of Hell wouldn’t worry me! Fellowes said. ‘Perhaps you’ve never lost anything of any importance,’ Scobie said.