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superiority to congresses. 'One hears only platitudes. Nevertheless,' he added, 'there is always a certain stimulus about the interchange of ideas.'
    'Ah, yes, the interchange of ideas.' Gerald Middleton reiterated the phrase, and his handsome, sensual face with its contour-map of lines and furrows assumed a perfunctory gravity in courtesy to foreign pomposity. 'The trouble is, of course, when, like me, you haven't any to interchange. However, there's always the scandal, isn't there?'
    'Ah!' said Professor Pforzheim. 'Alas, we historians have so little scandal. We are not palaeontologists to display our Piltdowns.' He gave a sly look: 'Albion perfide,' he said in a guttural French accent. There was nothing, he always believed, Englishmen liked so much as a joke against themselves.
    Neither Sir Edgar nor Gerald seemed to realize the joke. Gerald said, 'One should always mistrust amateurs,' and his heavy eyelids seemed almost to close. Sir Edgar said, 'Ah, my dear fellow, we pursue humane studies, we're not technicians. All this spectrographic analysis and fluorine tests and what-not. There's no place for "sweet-and-light" in all that.'
    'No, no,' said Professor Pforzheim, shaking his head. 'The Tyranny of the Tool.'
    Gerald Middleton seemed to take this more jocularly. He glanced at Sir Edgar, but the old man would not share the joke.
    'I was told you wanted to see me,' Gerald said.
    'Ah, yes, my dear boy,' said Sir Edgar, for so he regarded Gerald's sixty-two years. 'This infernal business of the editorship may well come up this afternoon. I do hope you won't make a fuss about accepting it.'
    'I see no likelihood of fuss,' said Gerald. 'But don't count on my taking it. I can't say.'
    'You're very wrong, you know,' Sir Edgar said gravely. 'We need a certain breadth of interest, we need imagination, and we need someone who can write at least tolerable English, if the series is to be of any use.'
    'There's plenty of young fellows with all that,' Gerald said.
    'The next candidate is Clun,' Sir Edgar said grimly.
    Gerald's tone became sulky. 'I can't say at all,' he said.
    'Well, be prepared to discuss it,' Sir Edgar insisted, then, taking out a gold hunter watch, he said, 'Two minutes.'
    Professor Pforzheim bowed this time, then he said, 'Professor Clun, always so exact and methodical. How is he?'
    'Always so exact and methodical,' said Gerald.
    Pforzheim raised his eyebrows. 'And Dr Lorimer?'  he asked.
    'Always so inexact and unmethodical,' Gerald replied.
    'No, that's not fair, Middleton,' said Sir Edgar. 'She has a fine brain, Pforzheim, but she's not been well lately.'
    Gerald turned almost angrily on Sir Edgar. 'You don't understand my praises,' he said irritably.
    Professor Pforzheim intervened tactfully. 'But, Middleton, I was forgetting. You are exactly the man I wish to talk to. The last survivor of Melpham,' and he laughed. 'You were there, were you not?'
    'I was there, but I know nothing about it,' Gerald said, dismissing the subject.
    'Bur you can tell me something about the circumstances? We must talk afterwards.'
    'I was simply an undergraduate staying with the family, a friend of Stokesay's son Gilbert, you know. I didn't arrive until the excavation was practically over. ..." He seemed about to say more, then he checked himself.
    Sir Edgar led the way through the door on to the platform. Gerald's dark, flushed face had grown more and more irritable. 'There's not a chance in a hundred that I'll take the editorship,' he whispered to Sir Edgar; 'you'd better know that.'

CHAPTER 2
    'I DO not think,' said Sir Edgar, and his cracked old voice was additionally broken with emotion, 'that the Association has been privileged for a very long time to hear a speech at once so learned and so humane as the one we have heard this evening. Professor Pforzheim, in his survey of Dark Age and Early Medieval trade, has taken us on a vast geographical journey from Canton to the shores of the Iberian Peninsula, and from the Baltic to