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."
"Happy place! Happy people!"
"But even this place isn't the beginning of things here. Carnac was
older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have you heard in America
of Avebury? It may have predated this place, they think, by another
thousand years."
"Avebury?" said the lady who was called Belinda.
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