visits to temples, and the repeating of the most suitable poetry. They both of them had large quantities of its history by heart before they left Port Said again to go eastward, but that assimilation which is necessary before facts can become the food of culture, that kindling of the blood, as with romance, had not occurred. Lucia felt that she had got no more nourishment, mentally speaking, from Egypt than she would have got in a bodily sense by swallowing quantities of Brazil nuts without cracking their shells. Indeed, the simile might be pressed a little further. Instead of receiving nourishment, she was conscious merely of a violent mental indigestion, and the very mention of a temple gave her qualms of nausea. She had digested just that one thing—the grinning Nubian dancing-girls, the heat, the eager faces of the natives, the good, stuffy, sweet smell of living things—hot, southern, living things.
It was the same wherever they went. Lucia, quick to learn and retentive of memory, was a positive encyclopaedia of Indian affairs, of its art, its history, its flora and its fauna, before they touched at Bombay. But there was the assimilation still wanting; the country did not get into her blood, though here again she had a vital moment, when at the close of a day of great heat they saw Delhi smouldering under the dusty crimson sky of sunset.
But Edgar, though she did not believe that he assimilated any more than she did, seemed not to want to assimilate. It was enough for him, apparently, to place in the well-ordered shelves of his mind the volumes of knowledge now profusely illustrated by the memory of the places they had seen. To sit with her at Colonus, and read Mr. Murray's translation of the famous chorus, was sufficient; that appeared to make Colonus his. Or to read the account, in Mr. Grote's history, of the battle of Marathon while seated on the shore of the little bay was to make Marathon his own. He went even further than this. On one day of the sudden Greek spring he repeated to her the stanzas of the first chorus from Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon." That, for a moment, reached her, and when he recited the line, "Blossom by blossom the spring begins," and she saw the thickets and broken ground at the foot of Pentelicus starred with the crimson anemone and feathered with orchids, her emotion was stirred; the line became part of her, and beat in her blood. But Minorca (it turned out to be Minorca) had been a dismal failure as far as she was concerned. He had played her the prelude where the rain drops on the roof, but the piano on the yacht was not in very good tune,
