the
thrust from earth and the arch was locked on the keystone of
ecstasy. This was all, this was everything. Till he came to
himself in the world below. Then again he gathered himself
together, in transit, every jet of him strained and leaped,
leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the
unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the
climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.

She too was overcome, but silenced rather than tuned to the
place. She loved it as a world not quite her own, she resented
his transports and ecstasies. His passion in the cathedral at
first awed her, then made her angry. After all, there was the
sky outside, and in here, in this mysterious half-night, when
his soul leapt with the pillars upwards, it was not to the stars
and the crystalline dark space, but to meet and clasp with the
answering impulse of leaping stone, there in the dusk and
secrecy of the roof. The far-off clinching and mating of the
arches, the leap and thrust of the stone, carrying a great roof
overhead, awed and silenced her.

But yet--yet she remembered that the open sky was no
blue vault, no dark dome hung with many twinkling lamps, but a
space where stars were wheeling in freedom, with freedom above
them always higher.

The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to
the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that
closed her in, and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the
ultimate confine. His soul would have liked it to be so: here,
here is all, complete, eternal: motion, meeting, ecstasy, and no
illusion of time, of night and day passing by, but only
perfectly proportioned space and movement clinching and
renewing, and passion surging its way into great waves to the
altar, recurrence of ecstasy.

Her soul too was carried forward to the altar, to the
threshold of Eternity, in reverence and fear and joy. But ever
she hung back in the transit, mistrusting the culmination of the
altar. She was not to be flung forward on the lift and lift of
passionate flights, to be cast at last upon the altar steps as
upon the shore of the unknown. There was a great joy and a
verity in it. But even in the dazed swoon of the cathedral, she
claimed another right. The altar was barren, its lights gone
out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying
there. She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than
the roof. She had always a sense of being roofed in