“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.