“Why—­why, I don’t know, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe you could guess, either.  I looked up ‘archaeologist’ in the dictionary.”

Mr. Bangs blinked surprise behind the spectacles.

“In the—­in the dictionary?” he repeated.  “Oh—­ah—­dear me!  Really!”

“Yes.  I’m afraid you’ll think I am awfully ignorant, but to save my soul I couldn’t think what an archaeologist did, what sort of a business it was, I mean.  Of course, I knew I ought to know, and that I did know once, but it seemed to be perfectly certain that I didn’t know then.  So I looked it up.  It fits in with what you told Primmie and me about travelin’—­that camel driver creature and all—­and yet—­and yet, you know, I was surprised.”

“Surprised?  Really?  Yes, of course, but—­but why?”

“Well, because somehow you don’t look like that kind of man.  I mean the kind of man who travels in all sorts of wild places and does dangerous things, you know, and—­”

Galusha’s desire to protest overcame his politeness.  He broke in hurriedly.

“Oh, but I’m not, you know,” he cried.  “I’m not really.  Dear me, no!”

“But you said you had been to—­to Africa, was it?—­three or four times.”

“Oh, but those were my Abyssinian trips.  Abyssinia isn’t wild, or dangerous, any more than Egypt.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“No, not in the least, really.  Oh, dear me, no!”

“Not with darky camel drivers stealin’ your—­er—­underclothes and goodness knows what?  It sounds a little wild to me.”

“Oh, but it isn’t, I assure you.  And Egypt—­ah—­Egypt is a wonderful country.  On my most recent trip I. . . .  May I tell you?”

He began to tell her without waiting for permission.  For the next hour Martha Phipps journeyed afar, under an African sun, over desert sands, beside a river she had read of in her geography when a girl, under palm trees, amid pyramids and temples and the buried cities of a buried people.  And before her skipped, figuratively speaking, the diminutive figure of Galusha Bangs, guiding, pointing, declaiming, describing, the incarnation of enthusiastic energy, as different as anything could be from the mild, dreamy little person who had sat opposite her at the supper table so short a time before.

The wooden clock on the mantel—­it had wooden works and Martha wound it each night before she went to bed—­banged its gong ten times.  Mr. Bangs descended from Egypt as if he had fallen from a palm tree, alighting upon reality and Cape Cod with startled suddenness.

“Oh, dear me!” he cried.  “What was that?  Goodness me, it can’t be ten o’clock, can it?  Oh, I must have talked you almost to death, Miss Phipps.  I must have bored you to distraction, I must really.  Oh, I’m so sorry!”

Miss Martha also seemed to be coming out of a dream, or trance.  She stirred in her chair.