The hall was like a temple in its sense of space and height and clear air, but its proportions did not impress one, and indeed one could not remember its boundaries as one does not consider the boundaries of a grove.  It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful grotesques—­but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence due a phase.  The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal.  All the seats faced a great dais at the chamber’s far end where three thrones were set.

But it was the men and women in the great chamber who filled St. George with wonder.  The women—­they were beautiful women, slow-moving, slow-eyed, of soft laughter and sudden melancholy, and clear, serene profiles and abundant hair.  And they were all alive, fully and mysteriously alive, alive to their finger-tips.  It was as if in comparison all other women acted and moved in a kind of half-consciousness.  It was as if, St. George thought vaguely, one were to step through the frame of a pre-Raphaelite tapestry and suddenly find its strange women rejoicing in fulfillment instead of yearning, in noon instead of dusk.  As he stood looking down the vast chamber, all springing columns and light lines lifting through the honey-coloured air, it smote St. George that these people, instead of being far away, were all near, surprisingly, unbelievably near to him,—­in a way, nearer to his own elusive personality than he was himself.  They were all obviously of his own class; he could perfectly imagine his mother, with her old lace and Roman mosaics, moving at home among them, and the bishop, with his wise, kindly smile.  Yet he was irresistibly reminded of a certain haunting dream of his childhood in which he had seemed to himself to walk the world alone, with every one else allied against him because they all knew something that he did not know.  That was it, he thought suddenly, and felt his pulse quickening at the intimation:  They all knew something that he did not know, that he could not know.  But, as they swept him with their clear-eyed, impersonal look, a look that seemed in some exquisite fashion to take no account of individuality, he was gratefully aware of a curious impression that they would like to have had him know, too.

“They wish I knew—­they’d rather I did know,” St. George found himself thinking in a strange excitement, “if only I could know—­if only I could know.”

He looked about him, smiling a little at his folly.  He saw the light flash on Amory’s glasses as they turned inquisitively on this and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.

“Ah well,” he assured himself, “I’ll look them up in a thousand years or so, and we’ll dine together, and then we’ll say:  ’Don’t you remember how I didn’t know?’”