dictionary?' says he. 'Not I!' As you know, my schooling never went
much beyond the three R's, and hanged if I knew what a classical
dictionary was. 'Better take one,' says Lomax. 'You'll want to look up
your gods and goddesses.' So I took it, and I've been looking into it
these last few days."

"Well?"

Jacob had a comical look of perplexity and indignation. He thumped the
table.

"Do you mean to tell me that's the kind of stuff boys are set to learn
at school?"

"A good deal of it comes in."

"Then all I can say is, no wonder the colleges turn out such a lot of
young blackguards. Why, man, I could scarcely believe my eyes! You mean
to say that, if I'd had a son, he'd have been brought up on that kind
of literature, and without me knowing anything about it? Why, I've
locked the book up; I was ashamed to let it lay on the table."

"It's the old Lempriere, I suppose," said Spence, vastly amused. "The
new dictionaries are toned down a good deal; they weren't so squeamish
in the old days."

"But the lads still read the books these things come out of, eh?"

"Oh yes. It has always been one of the most laughable inconsistencies
in English morality. Anything you could find in the dictionary is milk
for babes compared with several Greek plays that have to be read for
examinations."

"It fair caps me, Spence! Classical education that is, eh? That's what
parsons are bred on? And, by the Lord, you say they're beginning it
with girls?"

"Very zealously."

"Nay--!"

Jacob threw up his arms, and abandoned the effort to express himself.

Later, when the guests were gone, Spence remembered this, and, to
Eleanor's surprise, he broke into uproarious laughter.

"One of the best jokes I ever heard! A fresh, first-hand judgment on
the morality of the Classics by a plain-minded English man of
business." He told the story. "And Bradshaw's perfectly right; that's
the best of it."

CHAPTER III

THE BOARDING-HOUSE ON THE MERGELLINA

The year was 1878. A tourist searching his Baedeker for a genteel but
not oppressively aristocratic _pension_ in the open parts of Naples
would have found himself directed by an asterisk to the establishment
kept by Mrs. Gluck on the Mergellina;--frequented by English and
Germans, and very comfortable. The recommendation was a just one. Mrs.
Gluck enjoyed the advantage of having lived as many years in England as
she had in Germany; her predilections leaned, if anything, to the
Englis