White steeple (The Pretext)

The “white steeple” (Lewis, 1968, p. 641) is mentioned in the same passage as the library cupola which is explained here. It is the steeple of the Congregational church which is, of course, located on the university campus (Lewis, 1968, p. 641).

As the picture shows, a steeple is “a tall pointed tower on the roof of a church, often with a spire on it” (Hornby, 2015, p. 1533). Like the library cupola, the white steeple changes its looks under the influence of the light of the sunset. It becomes “a campanile topped by a winged spirit” (Lewis, 1968, p. 641) which is a more poetic description of the steeple even though Hornby (2015) defines a campanile as “a tower that contains a bell, especially one that is not part of another building” (p. 213). Because there is a winged spirit on the steeple, the tower of the church may have some sort of angel statue on its top.

Sources:

Hornby, A. S. (2015). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, R. W. B. (1968). The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.