“It is quite true what Mr Winthrop said. I never saw anything so poetical,” said Grace; “such a wonderful dreamy vista!--don’t you think so, papa? When you look out to the end of the street you can’t tell what it is you see. The light is just like a dull topaz--wasn’t that what Mr Winthrop said? and you can’t tell what is beyond; it might be palaces or mountains, or one can’t tell what. And to think it is England! and then that sort of roar of the carriages. It is not like the sea; it is like---- Oh, why should one try for similes?--it is like--just London, I suppose.”
“Wait till you know a little more about London,” said the father, “before you pronounce what it’s like.”
“One knows,” said Grace, with a little solemnity. “One does not need to wait. I suppose London is like no other place in the world.”
“Perhaps not,” Yorke said with a half laugh; “but you will never know what it is if you should live a hundred years.”
He spoke in one sense, they responded in another.
“I can believe that,” said Grace, with the same gravity. “It is a mystery. We cannot know, but we can divine.”
“God forbid!” her father said, and then he changed his tone. “Westminster is one way and St Paul’s another,” he said. “You can’t go both ways at once. You had better make up your minds which you will have.”
And then a little argument ensued. The girls had read a great deal, and they had good memories. One of them espoused the cause of St Paul’s and the other that of Westminster: the one going over the glorious inhabitants of the Abbey, demanding, with Milton--
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones The labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
though I hope they knew that Shakespeare was not there--while the other launched herself upon Tennyson’s ode--
“Mighty Seaman, this is he, Was great by land as thou by sea.”
The father remained quite silent in the midst of it all. It seemed, indeed, as if he had betrayed them into this fanciful controversy on purpose that he might be able to take refuge in his own thoughts. What was Westminster or St Paul’s to him? His mind was busy with events which no poet had ever celebrated, which had never been put into history. Neither wife nor children knew of them--only some people at home, people who might be dead long ago, whom he had not heard of, and who had not heard of him for thirty years. He got the required leisure and quiet to think this all over while the others were busy with their poetry. They appealed to him, and he gave them a little nod and half smile, one of those smiles that are but for a moment, a gleam of enforced attention instantly falling back into the gravity of prevailing thought. The decision finally was for Westminster. As for these young people, they did not know the difference between St Paul’s and the Abbey. They were both old, reverend, glorious structures to Grace and Milly; but what it might be that made the difference between them they did not know. One meant Poets’ Corner, the other that about the mighty Seaman. They had never seen a Gothic cathedral in their lives.