"That's all right," said Padway. "I wasn't reading all of them. If you're not using the first volume . . ."
"Certainly, certainly, my dear young man. I ought to warn you, though, to be careful to put it back in its proper place. Scylla cheated of her prey by Jason has no fury like that of our esteemed librarian when people misplace his books. And what, may I ask, do you think of the work of our illustrious pretorian prefect?"
"That depends," said Padway judiciously. "He has a lot of facts you can't get elsewhere. But I prefer my facts straight."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean with less flowery rhetoric."
"Oh, but my dear, dear young man! Here we moderns have at last produced a historian to rank with the great Livius, and you say you don't like—" He glanced up, lowered his voice, and leaned forward. "Just consider the delicate imagery, the glorious erudition! Such style! Such wit!"
"That's just the trouble. You can't give me Polybius, or even Julius Caesar—"
"Julius Caesar! Why everybody knows he couldn't write! They use his Gallic War as an elementary Latin text for foreigners! All very well for the skin-clad barbarian, who through the gloomy fastnesses of the northern forests pursues the sanguinary boar and horrid bear. But for cultivated men like ourselves—I ask you, my dear young man! Oh"—he looked embarrassed—"you will understand that in my remarks on foreigners I meant nothing personal. I perceive that you are an outlander, despite your obvious breeding and erudition.
Are you by any chance from the fabled land of Hind, with its pearl-decked maidens and its elephants?"
"No, farther away than that," said Padway. He knew he had flushed a literary Roman patrician, of the sort who couldn't ask you to pass the butter without wrapping the request in three puns, four mythological illusions, and a dissertation on the manufacture of butter in ancient Crete. "A place called America. I doubt whether I should ever return, though."