The guide showed them over two of the cells that opened
thereupon, each a delightful house for a solitary, bookish and
clean, and each with a little secret walled garden of its own. He
was covertly tipped against all regulations and departed regretfully
with a beaming dismissal from Amanda. She found Benham wondering
why the Carthusians had failed to produce anything better in the
world than a liqueur. "One might have imagined that men would have
done something in this beautiful quiet; that there would have come
thought from here or will from here."
"In these dear little nests they ought to have put lovers," said
Amanda.
"Oh, of course, YOU would have made the place Thelema. . . ."
But as they went shaking and bumping back along the evil road to
Milan, he fell into a deep musing. Suddenly he said, "Work has to
be done. Because this order or that has failed, there is no reason
why we should fail. And look at those ragged children in the road
ahead of us, and those dirty women sitting in the doorways, and the
foul ugliness of these gaunt nameless towns through which we go!
They are what they are, because we are what we are--idlers,
excursionists.
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