We walked up Steep Hill this morning to see the Jews’ house, but long before we reached it I had seen Mr. Copley sitting on a camp-stool, with his easel in front of him. Wonderful to relate, Aunt Celia recognised him, and was most cordial in her greeting. As for me, I was never so embarrassed in my life. I felt as if he [p57] knew that I had expected to see him in London and Ely and Peterborough, though, of course, he couldn’t know it, even if he looked for, and missed, me in those three dreary and over-estimated places. He had made a most beautiful drawing of the Jews’ House, and completed his conquest of Aunt Celia by presenting it to her. I should like to know when my turn is coming; but, anyway, she asked him to luncheon, and he came, and we had such a cosy, homelike meal together. He is even nicer than he looks, which is saying a good deal more than I should, even to a locked book. Aunt Celia dozed a little after luncheon, and Mr. Copley almost talked in whispers, he was so afraid of disturbing her nap. It is just in these trifling things that one can tell a true man—courtesy to elderly people and consideration for their weaknesses. He has done something in the world; I was sure that he had. He [p58] has a little income of his own, but he is too proud and ambitious to be an idler. He looked so manly when he talked about it, standing up straight and strong in his knickerbockers. I like men in knickerbockers. Aunt Celia doesn’t. She says she doesn’t see how a well-brought-up Copley can go about with his legs in that condition. I would give worlds to know how Aunt Celia ever unbent sufficiently to get engaged. But, as I was saying, Mr. Copley has accomplished something, young as he is. He has built three picturesque suburban churches suitable for weddings, and a State lunatic asylum.
Aunt Celia says we shall have no worthy architecture until every building is made an exquisitely sincere representation of its deepest purpose—a symbol, as it were, of its indwelling meaning. I should think it would be very difficult to design a lunatic asylum on that basis, but I didn’t dare say [p59] so, as the idea seemed to present no incongruities to Mr. Copley. Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I’m going to quote them some time offhand, just after matins, when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: ‘The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportion and perspective of vegetable beauty.’ Then when he has recovered from the shock of this, here is my second: ‘Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, [p60] his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce.’
Memoranda: Lincoln choir is an example of Early English or First Pointed, which can generally be told from something else by bold projecting buttresses and dog-tooth moulding round the abacusses. (The plural is my own, and it does not look right.) Lincoln Castle was the scene of many prolonged sieges, and was once taken by Oliver Cromwell.
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He
York, June 26,
The Black Swan.
Kitty Schuyler is the concentrated essence of feminine witchery. Intuition strong, logic weak, and the two qualities so balanced as to produce an indefinable charm; will-power large, but docility equal, [p61] if a man is clever enough to know how to manage her; knowledge of facts absolutely nil, but she is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it. She has a way of evading, escaping, eluding, and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender. She is divinely innocent, but roguishness saves her from insipidity. Her looks? She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces; and she is worth looking at, though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head. When you find a girl who combines all the qualities you have imagined in the ideal, and who has added a dozen or two on her own account, merely to distract you past all hope, why stand up and try to resist her charm? Down on your knees like a man, say I!
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I’m getting to adore Aunt Celia. I didn’t care for her at first, but she is so [p62] deliciously blind. Anything more exquisitely unserviceable as a chaperon I can’t imagine. Absorbed in antiquity, she ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers. That any man could look at Kitty when he could look at a cathedral passes her comprehension. I do not presume too greatly on her absent-mindedness, however, lest she should turn unexpectedly and rend me. I always remember that inscription on the backs of the little mechanical French toys: ‘Quoiqu’elle soit très solidement montée, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine.’
And so my courtship progresses under Aunt Celia’s very nose. I say ‘progresses’; but it is impossible to speak with any certainty of courting, for the essence of that gentle craft is hope, rooted in labour and trained by love.