He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.

Himself, he said, was Norman, Miriam was Gothic.

She bowed in consent even to that.
One evening he and she went up the great sweeping shore of sand towards Theddlethorpe.

The long breakers plunged and ran in a hiss of foam along the coast.

It was a warm evening.