SHE
WINCHESTER, May 28, 1891 The Royal Garden Inn.
We are doing the English cathedral towns, aunt Celia and I. Aunt
Celia has an intense desire to improve my mind. Papa told her, when we
were leaving Cedarhurst, that he wouldn\'t for the world have it too much
improved, and aunt Celia remarked that, so far as she could judge, there
was no immediate danger; with which exchange of hostilities they parted.
We are traveling under the yoke of an iron itinerary, warranted neither
to bend nor break. It was made out by a young High Church curate in
New York, and if it had been blessed by all the bishops and popes it could
not be more sacred to aunt Celia. She is awfully High Church, and I
believe she thinks this tour of the cathedrals will give me a taste for ritual
and bring me into the true fold. I have been hearing dear old Dr. Kyle a
great deal lately, and aunt Celia says that he is the most dangerous
Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards Christianity.
Long ago, in her youth, she was engaged to a young architect. He,
with his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an
imaginary scale-drawing of her heart (up to that time a virgin forest, an
unmapped territory), which enabled him to enter in and set up a pedestal
there, on which he has remained ever since. He has been only a memory
for many years, to be sure, for he died at the age of twenty-six, before he
had had time to build anything but a livery stable and a country hotel.
This is fortunate, on the whole, because aunt Celia thinks he was destined
to establish American architecture on a higher plane,--rid it of its base,
time- serving, imitative instincts, and waft it to a height where, in the
course of centuries, we should have been revered and followed by all the
nations of the earth. I went to see the livery stable, after one of these
Miriam-like flights of prophecy on the might-have-been. It isn\'t fair to
judge a man\'s promise by one performance, and that one a livery stable, so
I shall say nothing.