darkness, and steeped in a blaze of mid-summer sun, the familiar
windows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now
they widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, now
glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were
cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic,
others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others
the sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in the
western wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like a
constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes form
these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all
veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed
to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy
distances and its little islands of illusion. All that a great
cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the
tranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness
of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty,
the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.

It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights
of St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with the
blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the
stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as
fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped
downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the
ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed
with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The
great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces,
seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the
watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed
them, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn't be war!
The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet
over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were,
of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and
convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic
words. Paris went on steadily about her mid-summer business of
feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were
the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century.

All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also. The