“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!...”