"Haven't you told her?" said Dr. Dimble to his wife.
"I haven't screwed myself up to it yet," said Mrs. Dimble. "Anyway, I expect she knows. Your own college is being so tiresome, dear. They're turning us out. They won't renew the lease."
"Oh, Mrs. Dimble!" exclaimed Jane. "And I didn't even know this was Bracton property. Mark never talks about College business."
"Good husbands never do," said Dr. Dimble. "At least only about the business of other people's colleges. Is no one coming in to have lunch?"
Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river, and felt too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.
"You'll have to wait for your lunch till I've seen Jane's new hat," said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting. When the hat was being put away again Mrs. Dimble suddenly said:
"There's nothing wrong, is there?"
"Wrong," said Jane. "Why? What should there be?"
"You're not looking yourself."
"Oh, I'm all right," said Jane, aloud. Mentally she added: "She's dying to know whether I'm going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is."
"Do you hate being kissed?" said Mrs. Dimble unexpectedly.
"Do I hate being kissed?" thought Jane to herself. "That indeed is the question. Hope not for mind in women---" She had intended to reply "Of course not," but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs. Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life: yet before they went downstairs she had told Mrs. Dimble that she was not going to have a baby but was a bit depressed from being very much alone and from a nightmare.
During lunch Dr. Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. "It's really wonderful," he said, "how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory's. You've noticed how there are two sets of characters? There's Guinevere and Lancelot and all those, all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and-usually more or less hostile. Mixed up with magic. Merlin too, of course, is British. Doesn't it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?"
"How do you mean, Dr. Dimble?" said Jane. "Well, wouldn't there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman ? People talking a Celticised Latin-something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But farther up country, in the out-of-the-way places, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the Druidical religion."
"And which would Arthur himself have been?" said Jane.
"One can imagine a man of the old British line, but a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together. There'd be jealousy from his own British family. And always that under-tow, that tug back to Druidism."
"And where would Merlin be?"
"Yes. . . . He's the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is ? He's not evil: yet he's a magician. He is obviously a druid: yet he knows all about the Grail."
"It is rather puzzling. I hadn't thought of it before."
"I often wonder," said Dr. Dimble, " whether Merlin doesn't represent the last trace of something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers."
"What a horrid idea," said Mrs. Dimble. "Anyway, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all, and he's safely dead and buried under Bragdon Wood as we all know."
"Buried but not dead, according to the story," corrected Dr. Dimble.
"Ugh!" said Jane involuntarily.
"I wonder what they will find if they start digging up that place for the foundations of their N.I.C.E.," said Dr. Dimble.
"First mud and then water," said Mrs. Dimble. "That's why they can't really build it there."
"So you'd think," said her husband. "And if so, why should they want to come here at all? They're not likely to be influenced by any poetic fancy about Merlin's mantle having fallen on them!"
"Merlin's mantle indeed!" said Mrs. Dimble.
"Yes," said the Doctor. "It's a rum idea. I dare say some of his set would like to recover the mantle well enough. I don't think they'd like it if the old man himself came back to life along with it."
"That child's going to faint," said Mrs. Dimble suddenly.
"Hullo! What's the matter?" said Dr. Dimble, looking with amazement at Jane's face. "Is the room too hot for you?"