Why, my dear, I have been reading—reading,” she pursued with rhythmical sonority, “in one of my favourite and most cherished volumes.”
And instantly there was for all her listeners a sense of some transforming radiance in the universe: an event of universal moment: the Doctor had been reading all day long. They looked at her with an awed stare.
“What,” Mrs. Martin nervously began, with a little giggle, “—what was it you were reading, Doctor? It must have been a good book to hold your interest all day long?”
“It was, my dear,” said Doctor Thornton sonorously and deliberately. “It was a good book. More than that, it was a great book—a magnificent work of genius to show us to what heights the mind of man may soar when he is inspired by lofty and ennobling sentiments.”
“What was this, Doctor Thornton?” Doctor Withers now inquired. “—Something of Tennyson’s?”
“No, Doctor Withers,” Doctor Thornton answered sonorously, “it was not Tennyson—much as I admire the noble beauty of his poetry. I was not reading poetry, Doctor Withers,” she continued, “I was reading—prose,” she said. “I was reading—Ruskin!” As these momentous words fell from her lips her voice lowered with such an air of portentous significance that the last word was not so much spoken as breathed forth like an incense of devotion. “Ruskin!” she whispered solemnly again.
And although it is doubtful if this name conveyed any definite meaning to her audience, its magical effect upon them was evident from the looks of solemn awe with which they now regarded her.
“—Ruskin!” she said again, this time strongly, in an accent of rapturous sonority. “The noble elevation of his thought, the beautiful proportion and the ordered harmony of all the parts, the rich yet simple style, and, above all, the sane and wholesome beauty of his philosophy of art—what nobler monument to man’s higher genius was ever built, my friends, than he proportioned in The Stones of Venice—itself a work of art entirely worthy of the majestic sculptures that it consecrates?”
For a moment after the sonorous periods of that swelling rhetoric had ceased, the old people stared at her with a kind of paralysis of reverent wonder. Then old Mrs. Grey, gasping with a kind of awed astonishment, said:
“Oh-h, Doctor Thornton, I think it’s the most wonderful thing the way
