No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.  At the age of twelve or so, having given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination.  One’s aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle who was last heard of—­poor man—­in Rangoon.  He will never come back any more.  But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth.  Look at that for a head (they say)—­nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows—­everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development—­ the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face.  And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it.  First you read Xenophon; then Euripides.  One day—­that was an occasion, by God—­what people have said appears to have sense in it; “the Greek spirit”; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare.  The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion.

Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.

“But it’s the way we’re brought up,” he went on.

And it all seemed to him very distasteful.  Something ought to be done about it.  And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed.  Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an American called Pilchard.  And he had come all the way to Greece and left her.  They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense—­what damned nonsense—­and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the proprietors of hotels.

In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows.  The whole of civilization was being condemned.

The waiter was quite indifferent to that too.  Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.

“I shall want to be called early to-morrow,” said Jacob, over his shoulder.  “I am going to Olympia.”