I'm getting to adore Aunt Celia. I didn't care for her at first, but she is so deliciously blind. Anything more exquisitely unserviceable as a chaperon I can't imagine. Absorbed in antiquity, she ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers. That any man could look at Kitty when he could look at a cathedral passes her comprehension. I do not presume too greatly on her absent-mindedness, however, lest she should turn unexpectedly and rend me. I always remember that inscription on the backs of the little mechanical French toys: 'Quoiqu'elle soit tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine.' And so my courtship progresses under Aunt Celia's very nose. I say 'progresses'; but it is impossible to speak with any certainty of courting, for the essence of that gentle craft is hope, rooted in labour and trained by love. [Illustration: She ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers] I set out to propose to her during service this afternoon by writing my feelings on the flyleaf of the hymn-book, or something like that; but I knew that Aunt Celia would never forgive such blasphemy, and I thought that Kitty herself might consider it wicked. Besides, if she should chance to accept me, there was nothing I could do in a cathedral to relieve my feelings. No; if she ever accepts me, I wish it to be in a large, vacant spot of the universe, peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practised repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, 'for that way madness lies.' * * * * * _She_ York, _June 28_, High Petergate Street. My taste is so bad! I just begin to realize it, and I am feeling my 'growing pains,' like Gwendolen in 'Daniel Deronda.' I admired the stained glass in the Lincoln Cathedral the other day, especially the Nuremberg window. I thought Mr. Copley looked pained, but he said nothing. When I went to my room, I consulted a book and found that all the glass in that cathedral is very modern and very bad, and the Nuremberg window is the worst of all. Aunt Celia says she hopes that it will be a warning to me to read before I speak; but Mr. Copley says no, that the world would lose more in one way than it would gain in the other. I tried my quotations this morning, and stuck fast in the middle of the first. Mr. Copley thinks I have been feeing the vergers too liberally, so I wrote a song about it called 'The Ballad of the Vergers and the Foolish Virgin,' which I sang to my guitar. Mr. Copley thinks it is cleverer than anything he ever did with his pencil. Of course, he says that only to be agreeable; but really, whenever he talks to me in that way, I can almost hear myself purring with pleasure.