“I’m afraid,” said the doctor mulishly.  “Impossible.”

(With the unspoken addition of, “You try her for a bit.”)

Miss Grammont stood up.  Everybody stood up.  “We can go first to look for shops,” she said.  “There’s those things you want to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books.  We can all go together as far as that.  And while you are shopping, if you wouldn’t mind getting one or two things for me....”

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off Belinda.  It seemed abominably unjust.  And it was also clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and eager to resume with him....

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable.  He could think over his notes....

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in their common programme....

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America.  “Young woman” was how he thought of her; she didn’t correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a “young lady “; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word “girl” with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word “boy.”  She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no particular tarnish or injury.  He could talk with her as if he talked with a man like himself—­but with a zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever women waste their wits in accumulating.  She was not talking for effect at all, she was talking because she was tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the cathedral.  A glimpse through a wrought-iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old houses, on which the cathedral stands.  They stood for some moments surveying it.

“It’s a perfect little lady of a cathedral,” said Sir Richmond.  “But why, I wonder, did we build it?”