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.