I set out to propose to her during service this afternoon by writing my feelings [p64] on the flyleaf of the hymn-book, or something like that; but I knew that Aunt Celia would never forgive such blasphemy, and I thought that Kitty herself might consider it wicked. Besides, if she should chance to accept me, there was nothing I could do in a cathedral to relieve my feelings. No; if she ever accepts me, I wish it to be in a large, vacant spot of the universe, peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practised repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, ‘for that way madness lies.’
* * * * *
[p65]
She
York, June 28,
High Petergate Street.
My taste is so bad! I just begin to realize it, and I am feeling my ‘growing pains,’ like Gwendolen in ‘Daniel Deronda.’ I admired the stained glass in the Lincoln Cathedral the other day, especially the Nuremberg window. I thought Mr. Copley looked pained, but he said nothing. When I went to my room, I consulted a book and found that all the glass in that cathedral is very modern and very bad, and the Nuremberg window is the worst of all. Aunt Celia says she hopes that it will be a warning to me to read before I speak; but Mr. Copley says no, that the world would lose more in one way than it would gain in the other. I tried my quotations this morning, and stuck fast in the middle of the first.
Mr. Copley thinks I have been feeing [p66] the vergers too liberally, so I wrote a song about it called ‘The Ballad of the Vergers and the Foolish Virgin,’ which I sang to my guitar. Mr. Copley thinks it is cleverer than anything he ever did with his pencil. Of course, he says that only to be agreeable; but really, whenever he talks to me in that way, I can almost hear myself purring with pleasure.
We go to two services a day in the minster, and sometimes I sit quite alone in the nave drinking in the music as it floats out from behind the choir-screen. The Litany and the Commandments are so beautiful heard in this way, and I never listen to the fresh, young voices chanting ‘Write all these Thy laws in our hearts, we beseech Thee,’ without wanting passionately to be good. I love, too, the joyful burst of music in the Te Deum: ‘Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.’ I like that word ‘all’; [p67] it takes in foolish me, as well as wise Aunt Celia.
And yet, with all its pomp and magnificence, the service does not help me quite so much nor stir up the deep places, in me so quickly as dear old Dr. Kyle’s simpler prayers and talks in the village meeting-house where I went as a child. Mr. Copley has seen it often, and made a little picture of it for me, with its white steeple and the elm-tree branches hanging over it. If I ever have a husband I should wish him to have memories like my own. It would be very romantic to marry an Italian marquis or a Hungarian count, but must it not be a comfort to two people to look back on the same past?