“My lord, do you hear in the distance the bells of St Paul’s ringing their peals?”
“Yes, they are ringing for the sacred union of clericalism with worldly wisdom.”
“How could we reconcile the symbolic ceremony of a crowned monarch with the limitations of our constitution?” asked Danford. “How was it possible to adapt obsolete palliaments to the democratic innovation of the coat and skirt? For I think we may truly call this revolution in feminine dress the 1789 of Histology.”
“You are right, my dear Dan, but I want to know what our epoch was aiming at?” asked Sinclair, sitting down on one of the steps. “Was it playing a practical joke on democracy, or was it acting a monarchical burlesque? What had our fashionable metropolis to do with the customs of a London which began at the Strand, and whose centre was the Tower? Doubtless, the auditory faculty of a Plantagenet would have suffered from the bustling London of Edward VII., and the clamouring noise of a railway station would have certainly upset the nerves of even that bloodthirsty Richard III.”
“The fact is, my dear fellow,” said Lionel, who sat down near Sinclair, “we had, before the storm, arrived at the cross-roads, and had to choose which turning we should take. Were we to go straight ahead, regardless of past traditions, on a motor car; or should we have chosen a shady road and ambled back to Canterbury on a Chaucerian cob, escorting that gentle dame yclept “Madam Eglantine”? The twentieth century was the sphinx confronting us. Were we going to meet it with an old adage, or were we at last to be Œdipus and solve the question?”
“As long as we dragged at our heels the worthless baggage of the past, we could not proceed on our road.” Danford stood in front of the two men. “We went to our political business in fairy coaches, and could not make out why we arrived too late for Parliamentary tit-bits. We were playing the fool on the brink of a precipice, and spent our time and energy in staging a sort of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in a graveyard. It was as tragic as it was flippant, and if posterity will laugh at our inconsistency, how much more must Mediævalism grin at our lack of adaptability. I should like to know what King Alfred or Queen Bess have to say about us?”