"Not in the least," said Ronder; "some of us even may feel just as you do about it."
"Brandon doesn't." Davray moved away. "I sometimes think that when I'm properly drunk one day I'll murder that man. His self-sufficiency and conceit are an insult to the Cathedral. But the Cathedral knows. It bides its time."
Ronder looked gravely at the melancholy, ineffective figure with the pale pointed beard, and the weak hands. "You speak very confidently, Mr. Davray," he said. "As with all of us, you judge others by yourself. When you know what the Cathedral's attitude to yourself is, you'll be able to see more clearly."
"To myself!" Davray answered excitedly. "It has none! To myself? Why, I'm nobody, nothing. It doesn't have to begin to consider me. I'm less than the dung the birds drop from the height of the tower. But I'm humble before it. I would let its meanest stone crush the life out of my body, and be glad enough. At least I know its power, its beauty. And I adore it! I adore it!"
He looked up as he spoke; his eyes seemed to be eagerly searching for some expected face.
Ronder disliked both melodrama and sentimentality. Both were here.
"Take my advice," he said smiling. "Don't think too much about the place...I'm glad that we met. Good afternoon."
Davray did not seem to have noticed him; he was staring down again at the Bishop's Tomb. Ronder walked away. A strange man! A strange day! How different people were! Neither better nor worse, but just different. As many varieties as there were particles of sand on the seashore.
How impossible to be bored with life. Nevertheless, entering his own home he was instantly bored. He found there, having tea with his aunt and sitting beneath the Hermes, so that the contrast made her doubly ridiculous, Julia Preston. Julia Preston was to him the most boring woman in Polchester. To herself she was the most important. She was a widow and lived in a little green house with a little green garden in the Polchester outskirts. She was as pretty as she had been twenty years before, exactly the same, save that what nature had, twenty years ago, done for the asking, it now did under compulsion. She believed the whole world in love with her and was therefore a thoroughly happy woman. She had a healthy interest in the affairs of her neighbours, however small they might be, and believed in "Truth, Beauty, and the Improvement of the Lower Classes."
"Dear Canon Ronder, how nice this is!" she exclaimed. "You've been hard at work all the afternoon, I know, and want your tea. How splendid work is! I often think what would life be without it'."