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It was evident 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."
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