‘The doctrinaires call it a fault,’ said Forbes indignantly, pointing out the feature to his companions.  ’I’d like to see them build anything nowadays with half so much imagination and charm.’

They looked enviously at the closed door of the Bodleian, they read the Latin names of the schools just freshly painted at intervals round the quadrangle, and then Forbes led them out upon the steps in front of the Radcliffe and S. Mary’s, and let them take their time a little.

‘How strange that there should be anything in the world,’ cried Miss Bretherton, ’so beautiful all through, so all of a piece as this!  I had no idea it would be half so good.  Don’t, don’t laugh at me, Mr. Forbes.  I have not seen all the beautiful things you other people have seen.  Just let me rave.’

‘I laugh at you!’ said Forbes, standing back in the shadow of the archway, his fine lined face, aglow with pleasure, turned towards her. ’I, who have got Oxford in my bones and marrow, so to speak!  Why, every stone in the place is sacred to me!  Poetry lives here, if she has fled from all the world besides.  No, no; say what you like, it cannot be too strong for me.’

Mrs. Stuart, meanwhile, kept her head cool, admired all that she was expected to admire, and did it well, and never forgot that the carriage was waiting for them, and that Miss Bretherton was not to be tired.  It was she who took charge of the other two, piloted them safely into the fly, carried them down the High Street, sternly refused to make a stop at Magdalen, and finally landed them in triumph to the minute at the great gate of Christchurch.  Then they strolled into the quiet cathedral, delighted themselves with its irregular bizarre beauty, its unexpected turns and corners, which gave it a capricious fanciful air for all the solidity and business-like strength of its Norman framework, and as they rambled out again, Forbes made them pause over a window in the northern aisle—­a window by some Flemish artist of the fifteenth century, who seems to have embodied in it at once all his knowledge and all his dreams.  In front sat Jonah under his golden-tinted gourd—­an ill-tempered Flemish peasant—­while behind him the indented roofs of the Flemish town climbed the whole height of the background.  It was probably the artist’s native town; some roof among those carefully-outlined gables sheltered his own household Lares.  But the hill on which the town stood, and the mountainous background and the purple sea, were the hills and the sea not of Belgium, but of a dream country—­of Italy, perhaps, the medieval artist’s paradise.

‘Happy man!’ said Forbes, turning to Miss Bretherton; ’look, he put it together four centuries ago, all he knew and all he dreamt of.  And there it is to this day, and beyond the spirit of that window there is no getting.  For all our work, if we do it honestly, is a compound of what we know and what we dream.’