standard things? Men perhaps, should you be
a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets
the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which
has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and
women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where
the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods
and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense
of illegitimate freedom--if freedom exists....

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from
the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to
cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that
strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a
small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs
which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer
them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and
finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched
beneath the turf.... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary
must have dug up those bones and given them a name.... What sort of a
man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I
daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining
clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the
neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a
feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates
cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both
to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to
clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great
question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the
Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on
both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to
believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is
about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a
stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or
child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the
case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess,
a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece
of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson