directly back to the De
Gournays who came with William the Conqueror, and laid the foundations of
this church and of England's civilization. To the sensitive, imaginative
girl this sacred temple, replete with history, fading off into storied
song and curious legend, meant much. She haunted its solemn transepts, and
followed with eager eyes the carved bosses on the ceiling, to see if the
cherubs pictured there were really alive. She took children from the
street and conducted them thither, explaining that it was her grandfather
who laid the mortar between the stones and reared the walls and placed the
splendid colored windows, on which reflections of real angels were to be
seen, and where Madonnas winked when the wind was east. And the children
listened with open mouths and marveled much, and this encouraged the pale
little girl with the wondering eyes, and she led them to the tomb of Sir
William Boleyn, whose granddaughter, Anne Boleyn, used often to come here
and garland with flowers the grave above which our toddlers talked in
whispers, and where, yesterday, I, too, stood.

And so Elizabeth grew in years and in stature and in understanding; and
although her parents were not members of the Established Religion, yet a
great cathedral is greater than sect, and to her it was the true House of
Prayer. It was there that God listened to the prayers of His children. She
loved the place with an idolatrous love and with all the splendid
superstition of a child, and thither she went to kneel and ask fulfilment
of her heart's desire. All the beauties of ancient and innocent days moved
radiant and luminous in the azure of her mind. But time crept on and a
woman's penetrating comprehension came to her, and the dreams of youth
shifted off into the realities of maturity, and she saw that many who came
to pray were careless, frivolous people, and that the vergers did their
work without more reverence than did the stablemen who cared for her
father's horses. And once when twilight was veiling the choir, and all the
worshipers had departed, she saw a curate strike a match on the
cloister-wall, to light his pipe, and then with the rector laugh loudly,
because the bishop had forgotten and read his "Te Deum Laudamus" before
his "Gloria in Excelsis."

By degrees it came to her that the lord bishop of this holy place was in
the employ of the State, and that the State was master too of the army and
the police and the ships that sailed away t