Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/162

150 Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some moments surveying it.

“It’s a perfect little lady of a cathedral,” said Sir Richmond. “But why, I wonder, did we build it?”

“Your memory ought to be better than mine,” she said, with her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp against the blue. “I’ve been away for so long—over there—that I forget altogether. Why did we build it?”

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. “My friend, the philosopher,” he had said, “will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are. You must talk to him—he is a very curious and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he says, passing thoughts. We are—what does he call it?—Man on his Planet, taking control of life.”