A Cathedral Courtship

MP3 Audio CD. A Cathedral Courtship

She

Winchester, May 28, ----,
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 travelling 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 were a creed, or a document that 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. Mamma was a Unitarian, and so when she was alive I generally
attended service at that church. Aunt Celia says it is not a Church;
that the most you can say for it is that it is a 'belief' rather loosely
and carelessly formulated. She also says that dear old Dr. Kyle is the
most dangerous Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards
Christianity.

Long ago, in her youth, Aunt Celia 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