[p21]
She
Salisbury, June 1,
The White Hart Inn.
We left Winchester on the 1.16 train yesterday, and here we are within sight of another superb and ancient pile of stone. I wanted so much to stop at the Highflyer Inn in Lark Lane, but Aunt Celia said that if we were destitute of personal dignity, we at least owed something to our ancestors. Aunt Celia has a temperamental distrust of joy as something dangerous and ensnaring. She doesn’t realize what fun it would be to date one’s letters from the Highflyer Inn, Lark Lane, even if one were obliged to consort with poachers and trippers in order to do it.
Better times are coming, however, for she was in a melting mood last evening, and promised me that wherever I can find an inn with a picturesque and unusual [p22] name, she will stop there, provided it is clean and respectable, if I on my part will agree to make regular notes of travel in my Russia-leather book. She says that ever since she was my age she has asked herself nightly the questions Pythagoras was in the habit of using as a nightcap:
‘What have I learned that’s worth the knowing?
What have I done that’s worth the doing?
What have I sought I should have shunned,
And into what new follies run?’
I asked her why Pythagoras didn’t say ‘runned’ and make a consistent rhyme, and she evaded the point by answering that Pythagoras didn’t write it in English.
We attended service at three. The music was lovely, and there were beautiful stained-glass windows by Burne-Jones and Morris. The verger (when wound up with a shilling) talked like an electric doll. If that nice young man is making a cathedral tour like ourselves, he isn’t [p23] taking our route, for he isn’t here. If he has come over for the purpose of sketching, he wouldn’t stop with one cathedral, unless he is very indolent and unambitious, and he doesn’t look either of these.