ident that the good things she had said at first came as the
natural expression of a broad stream of alert thought; they were no mere
display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things
so many clever women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not
talking for effect at all, she was talking because she was tremendously
interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted
to find another person as possessed as she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way
through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the
cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-iron gate of a delightful
garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains,
daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they
came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old
houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some moments
surveying it.

"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir Richmond. "But
why, I wonder, did we build it?"

"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with her
half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp against the blue.
"I've been away for so long-over there-that I forget altogether. Why DID
we build it?"

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking
as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her mind had been
prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. "My friend,
the philosopher," he had said, "will not have it that we are really the
individuals we think we are. You must talk to him--he is a very curious
and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race,
he says, passing thoughts. We are--what does he call it?--Man on his
Planet, taking control of life."

"Man and woman," she had amended.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had failed
altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on the inside
instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss Grammont and Sir
Richmond found very great difficulty in recalling why they had built
Salisbury Cathedral.

"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond. "But the
impulse was losing its force."

She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly quizzical
expression.

But he had his reply ready.

"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were already very
clever engineers. What interested u