ing force. Nobody seemed thinking and feeling with
me.... I have never realized until now what a gregarious beast man is.
It needed only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas
and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I talk to
you--That is why I have clutched at your company. Because here you are,
coming from thousands of miles away, and you talk my ideas, you fall
into my ways of thought as though we had gone to the same school."

"Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school," she said.

"You mean?"

"Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something better in
life than the first things it promised us."

"But you--? Disappointed? I thought that in America people might be
educating already on different lines--"

"Even in America," Miss Grammont said, "crops only grow on the ploughed
land."

Section 8

Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of Avalon and of
that vanished legendary world of King Arthur and his knights, and in
the early evening they came to Wells and a pleasant inn, with a
quaint little garden before its front door that gave directly upon the
cathedral. The three tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner
to the sculptures on the western face. The great screen of wrought stone
rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a clear blue sky in
which the moon hung, round and already bright. That western facade with
its hundreds of little figures tells the whole story of God and Man from
Adam to the Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it. It is an
even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that goes round
the chapter house at Salisbury. It presented the universe, said Sir
Richmond, as a complete crystal globe. It explained everything in
life in a simple and natural manner, hope, heaven, devil and despair.
Generations had lived and died mentally within that crystal globe,
convinced that it was all and complete.

"And now," said Miss Grammont, "we are in limitless space and time. The
crystal globe is broken."

"And?" said Belinda amazingly--for she had been silent for some time,
"the goldfish are on the floor, V.V. Free to flop about. Are they any
happier?"

It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best left alone.
"I trow not," said Belinda, giving the last touch to it.

After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the cathedral
and along by the moat of the bishop's palace, and Miss Se