She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.

There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the
last word. She said something--uttered some sound.

What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed
to see something beyond, something vaster--vaster than cathedrals,
vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised.
The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not
roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity
of space.

It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked
at her.

"What the devil," I said, hysterically--"what the devil do you play
these tricks upon me for?"

"You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."

"You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping after
fragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." I
felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," I
added; a proof of recovered equanimity.

We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken;
and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:

"You insist then in preserving your--your incognito."