"Don't you love Bond Street?" she gabbled on. "There's something
so unusual and distinctive about it; no other street anywhere else
is quite like it. Don't you know those ikons and images and things
scattered up and down Europe, that are supposed to have been
painted or carved, as the case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus, or
somebody of that sort; I always like to think that some notable
person of those times designed Bond Street. St. Paul, perhaps. He
travelled about a lot."

"Not in Middlesex, though," said Francesca.

"One can't be sure," persisted Merla; "when one wanders about as
much as he did one gets mixed up and forgets where one HAS been. I
can never remember whether I've been to the Tyrol twice and St.
Moritz once, or the other way about; I always have to ask my maid.
And there's something about the name Bond that suggests St. Paul;
didn't he write a lot about the bond and the free?"

"I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek," objected Francesca; "the
word wouldn't have the least resemblance."

"So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering in those
bizarre languages," complained Merla; "that's what makes all those
people so elusive. As soon as you try to pin them down to a
definite statement about anything you're told that some vitally
important word has fifteen other meanings in the original. I
wonder our Cabinet Ministers and politicians don't adopt a sort of
dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to deliver their speeches in; what a
lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved. But to go back