“And as though she was pining for you.”
He looks puzzled.
“Look there!” I say.
He looks.
We are standing high above the ground in the loggia into which our apartments open, and I point across the soft haze of the public gardens to a tall white mass of University buildings that rises with a free and fearless gesture, to lift saluting pinnacles against the clear evening sky. “Don't you think that rather more beautiful than—say—our National Gallery?”
He looks at it critically. “There's a lot of metal in it,” he objects. “What?”
I purred. “But, anyhow, whatever you can't see in that, you can, I suppose, see that it is different from anything in your world—it lacks the kindly humanity of a red-brick Queen Anne villa residence, with its gables and bulges, and bow windows, and its stained glass fanlight, and so forth. It lacks the self-complacent unreasonableness of Board of Works classicism. There's something in its proportions—as though someone with brains had taken a lot of care to get it quite right, someone who not only knew what metal can do, but what a University ought to be, somebody who had found the Gothic spirit enchanted, petrified, in a cathedral, and had set it free.”
“But what has this,” he asks, “to do with her?”
“Very much,” I say. “This is not the same world. If she is here, she will be younger in spirit and wiser. She will be in many ways more refined—”
“No one—” he begins, with a note of indignation.