ng-ground, or none which Miss Varley cared to seek.
It was Mrs. Venables who talked of Pompei--of the unique, almost
oppressive, so she said, interest of it. The Crevequers knew Pompei as a
place with nice hot, bright streets, scampered over by lizards, where it
was agreeable to spend an afternoon among the gaily-hued, roofless
houses, and go to sleep. But, they said, Christian Pompei was a better
place--it had more variety. Here the gulf yawned aggressively; Mrs.
Venables strove to throw a bridge by remarking that to some mental
standpoints the present teemed with an eternal interest that quite
obscured the past. The Crevequers supposed that this might be so.

Young Miranda Venables said that she thought the past was an awful bore.
She did not approve of Naples; she was vexed at missing the hockey and
beagling season at home, and she thought towns were beastly, especially
Italian towns. She hated them. She looked towards the Crevequers with a
rising of hope; here, it seemed, were two people who lacked intelligent
interest even as she did. Miranda was, from her mother's point of view,
a failure. She was in no way aesthetic, except sartorially. The Liberty
frocks and flopping hats that her soul loathed seemed to give an edged
incongruity to her pleasant round face, with its rosy cheeks and blue
eyes, and mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. She did not
rebel against the bitter yoke of the picturesque: it was not worth
while; she was merely used to remark, with her customary forcible
elegance of phrase, that if her mother chose to spend money on making
her look a guy, it was her look out, though Miranda considered it a pity
that she could not get better value than that for her outlay. But her
soul was not at all in her clothes; it was in quite different
things--chiefly in hockey.

She raised that theme.

'I say, couldn't we get up a sort of a club? There must be a ground
somewhere.'

But the Crevequers, it seemed, did not play hockey. It was sad how
everywhere gulfs yawned. Miranda sighed, and fell back upon her lunch.
That remains, even in Naples.

The Crevequers, on their side of the gulf, talked; they were really
quite entertaining; their acquaintance included such various types of
persons, their experience such interesting incidents. Some of the
incidents revealed them, personally, in a light rather unusual--a light
not apt, as a rule, to illumine a lunch-party. Of this they were
sublimely unconscious