FORE:UNIVERSAL HAT PROVIDERS.

FORE:

FORE:The day, as Miss Propert had already discovered in her little stuffy den, was exceedingly hot and airless, and Keeling, when he had passed through the reverberating square and under the arch leading into the Cathedral Close, found it pleasant to sit down on one of the benches below the elm-trees, which soared loftily among the tombs of the disused graveyard facing the west front of the Cathedral. Owing to Miss Propert��s rapidity in typewriting he had left the Stores half an hour earlier than usual, and here, thanks to her, was half an hour of leisure gained, for which he had no imperative employment. The quiet gray graves with head-stones standing out from the smooth mown grass formed his foreground: behind them sprang the flying buttresses of the nave. They were intensely different from the decorations of the town-hall; they had, as he for all his ignorance in architecture could see, an obvious purpose to serve. Like the arm of a strong man akimbo, they gave the sense of strength, like the legs of{84} a strong man they propped that glorious trunk. They were decorated, it is true, and the decoration served no useful purpose, but somehow the carved stone-work appeared a work of love, a fantasy done for the pleasure of its performance, an ecstasy of the hammer and chisel and of him who wielded them. They were like flames on the edge of a smouldering log of wood. He felt sure that the man who had executed them had enjoyed the work, or at the least the man who had planned them had planned them, you might say, ��for fun.�� Elsewhere on the battlemented angles of the nave were grotesque gargoyles of devils and bats and nameless winged things with lead spouts in their mouths to carry off the rain-water from the roof. Commercially they might perhaps have been omitted, and a more economical device of piping have served the same purpose, but they had about them a certain joy of execution. There was imagination in them, something that justified them for all their nightmare hideousness. The people who made them laughed in their hearts, they executed some strange dream, and put it up there to glorify God. But the man who perpetrated the little pink granite pilasters on the town-hall, and the man who painted the lilies on the looking-glass above Mrs Keeling��s drawing-room chimney-piece had nothing to justify them. The lilies and the pilasters were no manner of good: there was a difference between them{85} the flying buttresses and the gargoyles. But the latter gave pleasure: they paid their dividends to any one who looked at them. So did the verses in Omar Khayyam to those who cared to read them. They were justified, too, in a way that No. 1 drawing-room suite was not justified for the ��117 that, with extras, it cost the purchaser.

FORE:��You can leave the ledger on this table when you have finished,�� he said.

FORE:"You fancied that you saw something besides the light?"There was a moon somewhere above the snow-clouds that already were beginning to grow thin from the burden they had discharged, and the smug villas on each side of the road were clearly visible. She had to go up the length of Alfred Road, then turn down the street that led by St Thomas��s Vicarage, and emerge into West Street, where she lived with her brother. Already, a fortnight ago he had ascertained the number of their house, not asking for it directly, but causing her to volunteer the information, and since then he had half a dozen times gone through the street, on his way to and from the Stores in order to take a glance at it as he passed. He had wanted to know what the house looked like; he had wanted to construct the circumstances of her life, to know the aspect of her environment, to see the front-door out of which she came to her duties as his secretary. That all concerned her, and for that reason it concerned him. He knew the house well by now: he knew from chance remarks that he had angled for that her bedroom looked into the street, that Charles��s looked on to an old{154} disused graveyard behind. There was the dining-room and the sitting-room in front, and a paling behind which Michaelmas daisies flourished in a thin row. She cared for flowers, but not for flowers in a six-inch bed. They rather provoked her: they were playing at being flowers. She liked them when they grew in wild woodland spaces, and were not confined between a house-wall and a row of tiled path.