I was thinking like this: “I did intend to have steak and kidney pudding, but as the butcher is late, there won’t be time to cook it; there isn’t enough cold tongue—at least, that knobbly end part is no use—we have plenty of eggs in the house, so we must just make out with that soup left over from yesterday and omelettes; or we might easily have——”
“Either a viaduct or an amphitheatre or a villa; they aren’t sure as yet which it is,” went on Virginia. “You read about it yourself; it’s awfully interesting. There; in that column—see? ‘Roman Remains at Penglyn.’”
“At Penglyn? It can’t be Zebadiah,” I commented; “he wasn’t as old as _that_!”
Nevertheless, we aren’t particular to a few hundred years in our village. For I remember last year an old woman telling me, “Have you heard, m’m, of the great news in the village? The Black Prince is staying at the Inn! Yes, to be sure! And he seems to understand our language beautiful, he do; though they say he does speak the foreign to a gentleman what’s staying there with him. The only thing I was surprised about was to see how young he do look, considering of his age. Why, I remember hearing tell about him when I was at school!” Later on I found the historic potentate was a harmless Indian law-student.
Virginia kept on about the Roman excavations, and announced her intention of going to see them. I protested that I wasn’t going to be hauled across a stony mountainous region in a wagonette, and then change twice by slow train, an hour or so to wait at each change, and ditto to get back, all to see a few brick walls, when the garden so badly needed weeding.
She was indignant, said she should prefer to go alone to having unsympathetic and uninformed society; reminded me of the histories of nations that had been found embedded in brick walls, waxed eloquent on the subject of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone, skipped lightly from the pointed apex of the Pyramids to the significance of the flat roofs of Thibet, examined the walls of the buried cities in central Asia, and before I had fully realised that I was really travelling in the East, I found that she was examining the designs on the Aztec pottery of ancient Mexico.
