Three women with dusty shoes and brown faces came along under the Downs to Bignor village. They wore rough brown skirts, white blouses, and straw hats, and each carried a knapsack strapped over her shoulder. Now Bignor is particularly and remotely beautiful, especially when you have left the flat country behind you and climbed up to the church by the winding lanes. It is pure country, almost uninvaded by modernity, and so old in the midst of its perennial youth that you might hardly wonder at meeting a Roman cohort on the march, or a bevy of bronze-haired British girls laughing and singing between the hedgerows. The village shop with its timber and thatch might be a wood-cut from a romance. The Downs rise up against the blue, and their solemn green slopes, over which the Roman highway climbs, seem to accentuate the sense of silence and of mystery. Great beech woods shut in steep, secret meadows. There are lush valleys where the grass grows tall, and flowers dream in the sunlight. The three women came to Bignor church, and camped out in the churchyard to make their midday meal. Eve Carfax was one of them, brown, bright-eyed, with a red mouth that smiled mysteriously at beauty. Next to her sat Joan Gaunt, lean, strenuous, with Roman nose, and abrupt sharp-edged mouth. Her wrists and hands were big-boned and thin. The line of her blouse and skirt showed hardly a curve. She wore square-toed Oxford shoes, and very thick brown stockings. Lizzie Straker sat a little apart, restless even in repose, a pinched frown set permanently between her eyebrows, her assertive chin uptilted. She was the eloquent splutterer, a slim, mercurial woman with prominent blue eyes and a lax mouth, who protruded her lips when she spoke, and whose voice was a challenge. Eve had wanted to turn aside to see the remains of the Roman villa, but her companions had dropped scorn on the suggestion. “Wasting time on a few old bits of tesselated pavement! What have we got to do with the Romans? It’s the present that matters!” Eve had suggested that one might learn something, even from the Romans, and the glitter of fun in her eyes had set Lizzie Straker declaiming. “What tosh! And you call yourself an artist, and yet admire the Romans. Don’t you know that artists were slaves at Rome? Don’t ask me to consider any society that subsisted on slavery. It’s dead; doesn’t come into one’s line of vision. I call archæology the most abominable dilettante rot that was ever invented to make some old gentlemen bigger bores than their neighbours.” And so she had spluttered on all the way to Bignor church, working her voluble mouth, and punching the air with a small brown fist. The eloquence was still in her when she opened her packet of sandwiches, and her energy divided itself between declamation and disposing of mouthfuls of bread and ham.