Presently Miss Wycliffe drew Leigh on to talk of astronomy, of the Lick Observatory, of California, its climate, its products, and its people, subjects upon which he alone of the company possessed knowledge at first hand. He was impressed by his auditors' ignorance of all that country which lies west of the Mississippi, and a realisation of the bishop's sceptical attitude aroused him to partisan enthusiasm. Their conception of the West was as inadequate as the average Englishman's conception of America. Some few people they had known who had gone out to California for their health, and in a general way they appreciated the fact that the fruits and flowers of the coast were of peculiar size and beauty; but, after all, the place seemed to them more a colony of the United States than an integral part of the country, a place of such decidedly inferior interest to Europe that any time in the dim future would do for its inspection.
"Miss Wycliffe," he ended, "your interest has betrayed me into making a bore of myself."
"On the contrary," she returned, "I shall take the very first opportunity of going out to California. I shall be ashamed to go to Switzerland again without the Sierras as a background of comparison. And in the mean time I intend to begin the study of astronomy. I thought it would be jolly to bring up a party some evening to look through the telescope."
"By all means!" he cried.
"I have yet to see the day," said Cardington, "when Miss Felicity will do me the honour of begging the loan of a Latin grammar."
"I call that ungrateful," she returned. "Did n't I tramp all over the Roman Forum with you one boiling afternoon, while you explained that we had n't strayed into a stone quarry, as I had supposed?"
"So you did," he admitted. "That was a pleasant little archaeological giro, and you showed yourself upon that occasion to be an audience of great endurance."
This was only one indication Leigh had received of mutual experiences and interests between the two, yet, bewitched though he was, the discovery aroused no uneasiness within him. It was not only that he mentally exaggerated his colleague's age. His source of comfort was deeper, and lay in Miss Wycliffe's attitude of comradeship toward her old friend. It seemed that such an attitude must preclude romance, at least on her part. No man situated as he was could have avoided the speculation that now absorbed him in regard to the possible rivalry of another. In the end he decided that Cardington's gaze, when it lingered upon his hostess, betrayed reminiscence rather than hope.
It chanced that the dinner was followed by a wedding, one of those forlorn ceremonies sometimes performed in the houses of the clergy between those who seem to have no kin or friends or home of their own. The bishop summoned his guests as witnesses, and as Leigh took the seat which Miss Wycliffe made for him beside her, he was struck by the impression which this not unusual incident appeared to make upon her mind. She sat with her chin resting upon the palm of her hand, in absorbed, almost pained, contemplation, as if the actual scene were merely the starting-point of a long journey of the imagination.
In fact, there was nothing intrinsically interesting in the couple before them. They possessed not even the picturesqueness of speech and costume which belongs to the plebeian orders of older civilizations. These were the people that seemed to justify Schopenhauer's cynical contention concerning the economy of Nature, who invests youth with just enough transient beauty to ensure the perpetuation of the race, making men and women serve her purpose under the delusion that they are free agents and ministers to their own pleasure. Here were no pomp and circumstance to interpose their false colours before the sordid vista of the future. It lay glaringly before the imagination of the onlookers; and to avoid depths of spiritual depression, they had need to remind themselves of the happy blindness of those that moved their pity.