Neither Dr. Martineau nor the father of the family found the imaginative reconstruction of the Stonehenge rituals quite so exciting as the two principals. The father of the family endured some further particulars with manifest impatience, no longer able, now that Sir Richmond was encouraging the girl, to keep her in check with the slightly derisive smile proper to her sex. Then he proclaimed in a fine loud tenor, “All this is very imaginative, I’m afraid.” And to his family, “Time we were pressing on. Turps, we must go-o. Come, Phoebe!”

As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came floating back. “Talking wanton nonsense.... Any professional archaeologist would laugh, simply laugh....”

He passed out of the world.

With a faint intimation of dismay Dr. Martineau realized that the two talkative ladies were not to be removed in the family automobile with the rest of the party. Sir Richmond and the younger lady went on very cheerfully to the population, agriculture, housing and general scenery of the surrounding Downland during the later Stone Age. The shorter, less attractive lady, whose accent was distinctly American, came now and stood at the doctor’s elbow. She seemed moved to play the part of chorus to the two upon the stone.

“When V.V. gets going,” she remarked, “she makes things come alive.”

Dr. Martineau hated to be addressed suddenly by strange ladies. He started, and his face assumed the distressed politeness of the moon at its full. “Your friend,” he said, “interested in archaeology?”

“Interested!” said the stouter lady. “Why! She’s a fiend at it. Ever since we came on Carnac.”

“You’ve visited Carnac?”

“That’s where the bug bit her.” said the stout lady with a note of querulous humour. “Directly V.V. set eyes on Carnac, she just turned against all her up-bringing. ‘Why wasn’t I told of this before?’ she said. ‘What’s Notre Dame to this? This is where we came from. This is the real starting point of the MAYFLOWER. Belinda,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to see all we can of this sort of thing before we go back to America. They’ve been keeping this from us.’ And that’s why we’re here right now instead of being shopping in Paris or London like decent American women.”

The younger lady looked down on her companion with something of the calm expert attention that a plumber gives to a tap that is misbehaving, and like a plumber refrained from precipitate action. She stood with the backs of her hands resting on her hips.

“Well,” she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir Richmond and the rest to the doctor. “It is nearer the beginnings of things than London or Paris.”

“And nearer to us,” said Sir Richmond.

“I call that just—paradoxical,” said the shorter lady, who appeared to be called Belinda.

“Not paradoxical,” Dr. Martineau contradicted gently. “Life is always beginning again. And this is a time of fresh beginnings.”

“Now that’s after V.V.‘s own heart,” cried the stout lady in grey. “She’ll agree to all that. She’s been saying it right across Europe. Rome, Paris, London; they’re simply just done. They don’t signify any more. They’ve got to be cleared away.”

“You let me tell my own opinions, Belinda,” said the young lady who was called V.V. “I said that if people went on building with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals for two thousand years, it was time they were cleared up and taken away.”

“Corinthian capitals?” Sir Richmond considered it and laughed cheerfully. “I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of thing.”

“The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument!” said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. “It gave me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might understand English.”

The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. “When one is travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me for everything in Europe that I don’t want and have no sort of use for. It isn’t a bad sort of capital in its way, florid and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;—and that a whole continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get past it!...”

“It’s the classical tradition.”

“It puzzles me.”

“It’s the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed spread by the Romans all over western Europe.”

“And it smothers the history of Europe. You can’t see Europe because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble Arches and ARCS DE TRIOMPHE. You never get away from it. It is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can’t sit down. ‘The empire, gentlemen—the Empire. Empire.’ Rome itself is perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round stupid arches as though it couldn’t imagine that you could possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter’s and that frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes on.”

“AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS,” said Dr. Martineau.

“This Roman empire seems to be Europe’s first and last idea. A fixed idea. And such a poor idea!... America never came out of that. It’s no good-telling me that it did. It escaped from it.... So I said to Belinda here, ‘Let’s burrow, if we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus weeds got hold of us.’”

“I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly Corinthian, something called the Capitol,” Sir Richmond reflected. “And other buildings. A Treasury.”

“That is different,” said the young lady, so conclusively that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on that score.

“A last twinge of Europeanism,” she vouchsafed. “We were young in those days.”

“You are well beneath the marble here.”

She assented cheerfully.

“A thousand years before it.”

“Happy place! Happy people!”

“But even this place isn’t the beginning of things here. Carnac was older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have you heard in America of Avebury? It may have predated this place, they think, by another thousand years.”

“Avebury?” said the lady who was called Belinda.

“But what is this Avebury?” asked V.V. “I’ve never heard of the place.”

“I thought it was a lord,” said Belinda.

Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau, embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder of Avebury. Possibly he exaggerated Avebury....

It was Dr. Martineau who presently brought this disquisition upon Avebury to a stop by a very remarkable gesture. He looked at his watch. He drew it out ostentatiously, a thick, respectable gold watch, for the doctor was not the sort of man to wear his watch upon his wrist. He clicked it open and looked at it. Thereby he would have proclaimed his belief this encounter was an entirely unnecessary interruption of his healing duologue with Sir Richmond, which must now be resumed.

But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr. Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was to be thrust into an extreme proximity with him and the balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.

Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine historical imagination before, and he was evidently very greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was to be got out of this encounter.