“Nothing,” she insisted with bland firmness, “not even your blind conviction that everything the Greeks did was exactly right—just because they did it—will persuade me that they improved these temples by any marble plaster. Come over here and look at the warm red gold of those soaring fluted stems against the vivid blue! It is as if the splendour of sunset glowed upon them all day long. As if they had soaked in so much sun through all the bright centuries that now even the very stones gave it out again.” Peripatetica had been half inclined to believe this herself at first, but of course Jane’s opposition clinched her wavering suffrages for the stucco. “You lack in imagination,” she announced loftily. “You see only what you see. Try to realize what the marble background meant to the saffron-robed, flower-garlanded priests, and to the worshippers massed on the steps and in the peristyles in delicate-tinted chiton and chamyle—crocus, daffodil, violet-rose, ivory—like a living flower wreath from out the spring meadows encircling the white temple’s base—” “Oh, do stop trying to be Pater-esque!” scoffed Jane, “and let’s go to luncheon. That sounds too much like sublimated guide-book, and the hotel looks miles away to my unimaginative eye.” “We won’t, will we?” said Jane half an hour later, with her irreverent mouth full. Peripatetica knew what she meant. “Go on to-morrow? No, indeed. We’ll telegraph 204Cook to send our mail here until further notice—the idea of being told there was nothing to linger for at Girgenti! It’s the nicest place we’ve yet found in Sicily.” The room was full of the munching of tourists. From the talk in German, English, and French, could be gathered they had one and all “done” the five temples, the tombs, and San Niccola that morning—would “take in” the town sights that afternoon and pass on that evening or the next morning. The two Seekers, to whom the morning had not been long enough in which to dream and dispute over one temple, felt their heads growing dizzy at the rush with which the tourist stream flowed along its Cook-dug channels, and they gladly resolved to leave the current and climb up high and dry on the bank of this inviting little backwater. The announcement of their intention to stay on seemed to give the polite young proprietor of the hotel a strange shock. He offered better rooms looking on the terrace, and pension rates if they stayed more than three days, instead of the usual week for which that reduction is commonly made. A flutter of excitement at their behaviour passed at once through all the personnel of the hotel.