第6章

I should think it would be very difficult to design a lunatic asylum on that basis,but I didn't dare say so,as Mr.Copley seemed to think it all right.Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture.I have just copied two quotations from Emerson,and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep.I'm going to quote them some time offhand,just after morning service,when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds.The first is this:"The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone,subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower,with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportion and perspective of vegetable beauty."Then when he has recovered from the shock of this,here is my second:"Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder,and that his chisel,his saw and plane,still reproduced its ferns,its spikes of flowers,its locust,elm,pine,and spruce."

Memoranda:Lincoln choir is an example of Early English or First Pointed,which can generally be told from something else by bold projecting buttresses and dog-tooth moulding round the abacusses.

(The plural is my own,and it does not look right.)Lincoln Castle was the scene of many prolonged sieges,and was once taken by Oliver Cromwell.

HE

YORK,June 24

The Black Swan.

Kitty Schuyler is the concentrated essence of feminine witchery.

Intuition strong,logic weak,and the two qualities so balanced as to produce an indefinable charm;will-power large,but docility equal,if a man is clever enough to know how to manage her;

knowledge of facts absolutely nil,but she is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it.She has a way of evading,escaping,eluding,and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender.She is divinely innocent,but roguishness saves her from insipidity.Her looks?She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces;and she is worth looking at,though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head.When you find a girl who combines all the qualities you have imagined in the ideal,and who has added a dozen or two on her own account,merely to distract you past all hope,why stand up and try to resist her charm?Down on your knees like a man,say I!

I'm getting to adore aunt Celia.I didn't care for her at first,but she is so deliciously blind!Anything more exquisitely unserviceable as a chaperon I can't imagine.Absorbed in antiquity,she ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers.That any man could look at Kitty when he could look at a cathedral passes her comprehension.I do not presume too greatly on her absent-mindedness,however,lest she should turn unexpectedly and rend me.

I always remember that inion on the backs of the little mechanical French toys,--"Quoiqu'elle soit tres solidement montee,il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine."

And so my courtship progresses under aunt Celia's very nose.I say "progresses,"but it is impossible to speak with any certainty of courting,for the essence of that gentle craft is hope,rooted in labor and trained by love.

I set out to propose to her during service this afternoon by writing my feelings on the fly-leaf of the hymn-book,or something like that;but I knew that aunt Celia would never forgive such blasphemy,and I thought that Kitty herself might consider it wicked.Besides,if she should chance to accept me,there was nothing I could do,in a cathedral,to relieve my feelings.No;if she ever accepts me,I wish it to be in a large,vacant spot of the universe,peopled by two only,and those two so indistinguishably blended,as it were,that they would appear as one to the casual observer.So I

practiced repression,though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper,and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon,and not to look at her,"for that way madness lies."

SHE

YORK,June 26

High Petersgate Street.

My taste is so bad!I just begin to realize it,and I am feeling my "growing pains,"like Gwendolen in "Daniel Deronda."I admired the stained glass in the Lincoln Cathedral,especially the Nuremberg window.I thought Mr.Copley looked pained,but he said nothing.

When I went to my room,I looked in a book and found that all the glass in that cathedral is very modern and very bad,and the Nuremberg window is the worst of all.Aunt Celia says she hopes that it will be a warning to me to read before I speak;but Mr.

Copley says no,that the world would lose more in one way than it would gain in the other.I tried my quotations this morning,and stuck fast in the middle of the first.

Mr.Copley says that aunt Celia has been feeing the vergers altogether too much,and I wrote a song about it called "The Ballad of the Vergers and the Foolish Virgin,"which I sang to my guitar.

Mr.Copley says it is cleverer than anything he ever did with his pencil,but of course he says that only to be agreeable.

We all went to an evening service last night.Coming home,aunt Celia walked ahead with Mrs.Benedict,who keeps turning up at the most unexpected moments.She's going to build a Gothicky memorial chapel somewhere.I don't know for whom,unless it's for Benedict Arnold.I don't like her in the least,but four is certainly a more comfortable number than three.I scarcely ever have a moment alone with Mr.Copley;for go where I will and do what I please,aunt Celia has the most perfect confidence in my indiscretion,so she is always en evidence.

Just as we were turning into the quiet little street where we are lodging I said,"Oh dear,I wish that I knew something about architecture!"

"If you don't know anything about it,you are certainly responsible for a good deal of it,"said Mr.Copley.

"I?How do you mean?"I asked quite innocently,because I couldn't see how he could twist such a remark as that into anything like sentiment.