“Yes, and I’m glad I have the opportunity. How do you like my way?”
“I love it,” said Patty. “But all ways lead to Rome, so I suppose that’s how you happened to get here just now.”
“I suppose so,” returned Homer. “But Senator Lancastrius Van Winkleius and I came over to invite you Roman matrons to dine with us in my Triumphal Arch. Will you come?”
“What have you to dine on?” asked Violet.
“Ah, that’s the triumph! You come and see. It isn’t correct to ask your host such a question.”
So the four proceeded to the Arch of Severus, and there on some stones they found a box of sandwiches and a small pile of fruit.
“Primitive service, but good food,” remarked Peter, and the girls suddenly realised that they had a fine twentieth-century appetite.
“This is great,” declared Patty, as she sat on an old block of marble, with a sandwich in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other. “I approve of your method of ‘seeing Italy,’ and I think a triumphal arch the best place in the world to eat sandwiches.”
“And then you see,” said Peter, “it fixes this particular arch in your mind; and when wiseacres speak of Septimius Severus, you can say to yourself, ‘Ah, yes, his is the Arch of the Sandwiches.’”
“I shall never forget it,” said Violet, helping herself to some fruit. “I feel a personal friendship for old Severus.”