“Well,” said Kitty, in a daunted voice, “I must say it doesn’t sound very interesting! The book says that there is one department devoted to Manuscripts and Medals, »nd one to Natural and Artificial Products, and the third is Printed Books.”
“You don’t mean it!” Freddy ejaculated. “The thing’s a dashed take-in! A pretty set of bubble-merchants they must be, the fellows that look after that place! I’ll tell you what, Kit: it’s a fortunate thing you brought that book! Why, if we hadn’t had it we should have been done brown as a pair of berries! Wonder if m’father knows about it?”
“Well, I don’t think we need visit it,” said Kitty. She flicked over the pages of the guide book, but suddenly bethought her of her hostess’s parting admonition. “Oh, Meg said I must go to see the marbles which Lord Elgin brought from Greece! She says everyone has seen them! They are at Burlington House, she told me.”
Freddy said severely that it was a pity she had not remembered the marbles before they came to Hanover Square, but he gave the direction to the coachman, and confided, as the carriage wended its way southward again, that he would not object to taking a look at them. “Deuce of a dust kicked up about ‘em!” he said. “Seem to be all the crack, though.”
But when, having, as he put it, dropped the blunt for two tickets of admission and a catalogue, he confronted these treasures of ancient Greece, he was quite dumbfounded, and only recovered his voice when he was called upon to admire the Three Fates, from the eastern pediment. “Dash it, they’ve got no heads!” he protested. “No, but, you see, Freddy, they are so very old! They have been damaged!” explained Miss Charing.
“Damaged! I should rather think so! They haven’t got any arms either! Well, if this don’t beat the Dutch! And just look at this, Kit!”
“Birth of Athene from the brain of Zeus,” said Kitty, consulting the catalogue.
“Birth of Athene from what!”
“The central groups, which are the most important features of the composition, are missing,” said Kitty, in propitiating accents. “And the catalogue says that the metopes are not in good preservation either, so perhaps we should just study the frieze, which is excessively beautiful!”
But the disclosure that he had been maced of his blunt by a set of persons whom he freely characterized as hell-kites only to see a collection of marbles of which the main parts were missing so worked upon him that he could not be brought to recognize the merits of the frieze, but seemed instead to be so much inclined to seek out the author of this attempt to gull the public that Kitty hastily announced her wish to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, and coaxed him out of the building.