But my mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a disease.

She died looking at it.

Her spirit is somewhere round it now, I do believe." He paused, then went on: "It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose.

I who am an only child--I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always was my mother who told me everything." He was, I thought, the very simplest person to whom I had ever listened.

The irritation that I had already felt on several occasions in his company again returned.