“P’r’aps not, ma’am,” he replied with the utmost good temper. “I fancy I know something of seamanship and a little about natural history, but of most of the other ’ologies I confess my ignorance; and, for the life of me, I can’t see how some people can find anything to enjoy in the old pots and pans of our great-great-grandfathers!”
“You forget the light which these relics throw on the manners and customs of the ancients,” argued the other. “There’s a good deal of information to be gleaned from their mute testimony sure, me dear Captain.”
“Information?” growled the Captain. “Fiddlesticks! And as for the manners and customs of our ancestors; why, if all I have read be true, they were uncommonly similar to the account given by a middy of the natives of the Andaman Isles, as jotted down in his diary, ‘manners, none—customs, beastly!’”
“That’s shocking,” exclaimed Mrs Gilmour, laughing. “But the criticism will not apply to the Romans, who were almost as civilised and refined as ourselves.”
“And that’s not saying much!” said the Captain with one of his sly chuckles. “Faith we haven’t any to boast of!”
“Speak for yourself,” she retorted, “sure that’s a very poor compliment you’re paying me.”
“Present company always excepted,” he replied, with an old-fashioned bow like that of a courtier. “You know I didn’t allude to you.”
“I accept your apology, sir,” said she with equally elaborate politeness. “I would make you a curtsy if I were standing up, but you wouldn’t wish me to rise for the purpose. Did you not see, though, anything at all like the ruins of a Roman villa or house at Brading?”
The Captain took a pinch of snuff, as if to digest the matter before answering her question.
“Well, ma’am,” he began, after a long pause of cogitation, “we were shown some bits of brickwork, marked out in divisions like the foundations of a house: and a place with a hole in the floor which, they said, was a bath-room. We also saw a piece or two of tesselated pavement, with a lot of other gimcracks; but I certainly had to exercise a good deal of fancy to imagine a villa out of all these scattered details, like the Marchioness in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, which I was reading the other day, ‘made believe’ about her orange-peel wine!”