Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/452

 absurdity. "Perhaps if we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could settle that point," said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. "There's a fine view from the wall at the end of this path."

They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it his plan of the Forum.

Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, "Isn't it all horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth—why not now as well as later?"

She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel. Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. "Yes, I often feel as ancient as the stones," said Eugenia pensively.

Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, "Not on your life, it doesn't depress me! Why should it? You don't seem to realize. Miss Allen, what an immense difference there is between us! I never really took it in before myself—not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!"

Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and traced lines on his map.

Mr. Crittenden went on whimsically, "I don't believe you ever fully considered the great importance of that point, Miss Allen. It came home to me all over again as I was looking at that puppy. Millions of dogs have lived and died before him; but by some amazing miracle life is just as fresh a wonder to him as if he were the first puppy ever born into the world! It's incredible! I never realized it till I struck