Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/149

Rh 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.”