st, that he wouldn't for the world have it too much
improved, and Aunt Celia remarked that, so far as she could judge, there
was no immediate danger; with which exchange of hostilities they parted.

We are travelling under the yoke of an iron itinerary, warranted
neither to bend nor break. It was made out by a young High Church curate
in New York, and if it were a creed, or a document that had been blessed
by all the bishops and popes, it could not be more sacred to Aunt Celia.
She is awfully High Church, and I believe she thinks this tour of the
cathedrals will give me a taste for ritual and bring me into the true
fold. Mamma was a Unitarian, and so when she was alive I generally
attended service at that church. Aunt Celia says it is not a Church;
that the most you can say for it is that it is a 'belief' rather loosely
and carelessly formulated. She also says that dear old Dr. Kyle is the
most dangerous Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards
Christianity.

Long ago, in her youth, Aunt Celia was engaged to a young architect. He,
with his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an
imaginary scale-drawing of her heart (up to that time a virgin forest,
an unmapped territory), which enabled him to enter in and set up a
pedestal there, on which he has remained ever since. He has been only a
memory for many years, to be sure, for he died at the age of twenty-six,
before he had had time to build anything but a livery stable and a
country hotel. This is fortunate, on the whole, because Aunt Celia
thinks he was destined to establish American architecture on a higher
plane, rid it of its base, time-serving, imitative instincts, and waft
it to a height where, in the course of centuries, it would have been
revered and followed by all the nations of the earth.

I went to see the stable, after one of these Miriam-like flights of
prophecy on the might-have-been. It isn't fair to judge a man's promise
by one modest performance, and so I shall say nothing, save that I am
sure it was the charm of the man that won my aunt's affection, not the
genius of the builder.

This sentiment about architecture and this fondness for the very
toppingest High Church ritual cause Aunt Celia to look on the English
cathedrals with solemnity and reverential awe. She has given me a fat
note-book, with 'Katharine Schuyler' stamped in gold letters on the
Russia-leather cover, and a lock and key to conceal its youthful
inaniti