“The fact is, I suppose,” Gumbril Senior went on, smiling with a certain air of personal triumph, “the fact is that architecture is a more difficult and intellectual art than music. Music—that’s just a faculty you’re born with, as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense of plastic beauty—though that’s, of course, also an inborn faculty—is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It’s an affair of the mind; experience and thought have to draw it out. There are infant prodigies in music; but there are no infant prodigies in architecture.” Gumbril Senior chuckled with a real satisfaction. “A man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass along the streets in London, or any other city of the world, do know how to think or to profit by experience, it follows that they cannot appreciate architecture. The innate faculty is strong enough in them to make them dislike discord in music; but they haven’t the wits to develop that other innate faculty—the sense of plastic beauty—which would enable them to see and disapprove of the same barbarism in architecture. Come with me,” Gumbril Senior added, getting up from his chair, “and I’ll show you something that will illustrate what I’ve been saying. Something you’ll enjoy, too. Nobody’s seen it yet,” he said mysteriously as he led the way upstairs. “It’s only just finished—after months and years. It’ll cause a stir when they see it—when I let them see it, if ever I do, that is. The dirty devils!” Gumbril Senior added good-humouredly. On the landing of the next floor he paused, felt in his pocket, took out a key and unlocked the door of what should have been the second best bedroom. Gumbril Junior wondered, without very much curiosity, what the new toy would turn out to be. Shearwater wondered only how he could possess Mrs. Viveash. “Come on,” called Gumbril Senior from inside the room. He turned on the light. They entered. It was a big room; but almost the whole of the floor was covered by an enormous model, twenty feet long by ten or twelve wide, of a complete city traversed from end to end by a winding river and dominated at its central point by a great dome. Gumbril Junior looked at it with surprise and pleasure. Even Shearwater was roused from his bitter ruminations of desire to look at the charming city spread out at his feet. “It’s exquisite,” said Gumbril Junior. “What is it? The capital of Utopia, or what?” Delighted, Gumbril Senior laughed. “Don’t you see something rather familiar in the dome?” he asked. “Well, I had thought ...” Gumbril Junior hesitated, afraid that he might be going to say something stupid. He bent down to look more closely at the dome. “I had thought it looked rather like St. Paul’s—and now I see that it is St. Paul’s.” “Quite right,” said his father. “And this is London.”