So they walked.  She had her usual serious expression, as it were full of the consciousness of duty.  It made him think how reliable she would always be.  She held herself straight and independently, and her appearance was very simple and very trim.  He considered it wrong that a girl with such beautiful lips should have to consult callous bookbinders and accept whatever they chose to say.  To him she was like a lovely and valiant martyr.  The spectacle of her was touching.  However, he could not have dared to hint at these sentiments.  He had to pretend that her exposure to the stresses of the labour-market was quite natural and right.  Always he was careful in his speech with her.  When he got to know people he was apt to be impatient and ruthless; for example, to John Orgreave and his wife, and to his mother and stepfather, and sometimes even to Everard Lucas.  He would bear them down.  But he was restrained from such freedoms with Enwright, and equally with Marguerite Haim.  She did not intimidate him, but she put him under a spell.

Crossing Piccadilly Circus he had a glimpse of the rising walls and the scaffolding of the new restaurant.  He pointed to the building without a word.  She nodded and smiled.

In the Mall, where the red campanile of the cathedral was first descried, George began to get excited.  And he perceived that Marguerite sympathetically responded to his excitement.  She had never even noticed the campanile before, and the reason was that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers.  Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral.  It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk.  But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses.  Tier above tier the expensively curtained windows of dark drawing-rooms and bedrooms inhabited by thousands of the well-to-do blinked up at the colossal symbol that dwarfed them all.  George knew that he was late.  If the watchman’s gate was shut for the night he would look a fool.  But his confidence in his magic power successfully to run risks sustained him in a gallant and assured demeanour.  The gate in the hoarding that screened the west front was open.  With a large gesture he tipped the watchman a shilling, and they passed in like princes.  The transition to the calm and dusty interior was instantaneous and almost overwhelming.  Immense without, the cathedral seemed still more immense within.  On one side of the nave was a steam-engine; on the other some sort of a mill; and everywhere lay in heaps the wild litter of construction, among which moved here and there little parties of aproned pygmies engaged silently and industriously on sub-contracts; the main army of labourers had gone.  The walls rose massively clear out of the white-powdered confusion into arches and high domes; and the floor of the choir, and a loftier floor beyond that, also rose clear.  Perspectives ended in shadow and were illimitable, while the afternoon light through the stone grille of the western windows made luminous spaces in the gloom.