We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.
She was smiling. “Look!” she repeated. I looked.
There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the last word. She said something—uttered some sound.
What had happened? I don’t know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity of space.
It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked at her.
“What the devil,” I said, hysterically—“what the devil do you play these tricks upon me for?”
“You see,” she answered, “the rudiments of the sense are there.”
“You must excuse me if I fail to understand,” I said, grasping after fragments of dropped dignity. “I am subject to fits of giddiness.” I felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. “Pardon my swearing,” I added; a proof of recovered equanimity.
We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken; and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:
“You insist then in preserving your—your incognito.”