“Perhaps we have gone to the same school,” she said.

“You mean?”

“Disappointment.  Disillusionment.  Having to find something better in life than the first things it promised us.”

“But you—?  Disappointed?  I thought that in America people might be educating already on different lines—­”

“Even in America,” Miss Grammont said, “crops only grow on the ploughed land.”

Section 8

Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of King Arthur and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells and a pleasant inn, with a quaint little garden before its front door that gave directly upon the cathedral.  The three tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner to the sculptures on the western face.  The great screen of wrought stone rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a clear blue sky in which the moon hung, round and already bright.  That western facade with its hundreds of little figures tells the whole story of God and Man from Adam to the Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it.  It is an even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that goes round the chapter house at Salisbury.  It presented the universe, said Sir Richmond, as a complete crystal globe.  It explained everything in life in a simple and natural manner, hope, heaven, devil and despair.  Generations had lived and died mentally within that crystal globe, convinced that it was all and complete.

“And now,” said Miss Grammont, “we are in limitless space and time.  The crystal globe is broken.”

“And?” said Belinda amazingly—­for she had been silent for some time, “the goldfish are on the floor, V.V.  Free to flop about.  Are they any happier?”

It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best left alone.  “I trow not,” said Belinda, giving the last touch to it.

After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the cathedral and along by the moat of the bishop’s palace, and Miss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to her friends, a duty she had neglected for some days.  The evening was warm and still and the moon was approaching its full and very bright.  Insensibly the soft afterglow passed into moonlight.

At first the two companions talked very little.  Sir Richmond was well content with this tacit friendliness and Miss Grammont was preoccupied because she was very strongly moved to tell him things about herself that hitherto she had told to no one.  It was not merely that she wanted to tell him these things but also that for reasons she did not put as yet very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought to know.  She talked of herself at first in general terms.  “Life comes on anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting for ever and then suddenly one tears into life,” she said.  It was even more so for women than it was for men.