Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/473

 N. Medjila bore less than ever the appearance of having been at one time a resident of Rock Island, Illinois: he had added a brown burnous to his costume of the evening before, and his pupil a small black felt hat to hers, so that even more pointedly they suggested, especially in that place, a moment of theatrical fantasia.

They saw Ogle upon his high seat, waved to him cordially; then climbed up and sat beside him.

"You were thinking of what comedies and tragedies have been played down there," Dr. Medjila said, wiping his large and rosy forehead, and breathing with some heaviness after the ascent. "If you know what dramas the Romans played, you agree with me that most of them were for the idiot mind. But we are strange people, we moderns. We see a little carving on an old wall and we say, 'What ignorant fellow did that?' Then somebody tells us it was done two thousand years ago, and we begin to shout, 'What magnificent art!' The travellers who come here shout as loudly over the bad things as over the good things."

"I suppose we do," Ogle said. "I was thinking of all this Roman solidity, though, and wondering what