"Do you ever try," she asked, as we turned down the dingy thoroughfare,
"to picture to yourself familiar places as they looked a couple of
hundred years ago?"
"Yes," I answered, "and very difficult I find it. One has to manufacture
the materials for reconstruction, and then the present aspect of the
place will keep obtruding itself. But some places are easier to
reconstitute than others."
"That is what I find," said she. "Now Holborn, for example, is quite
easy to reconstruct, though I daresay the imaginary form isn't a bit
like the original. But there are fragments left, like Staple Inn and the
front of Gray's Inn; and then one has seen prints of the old Middle Row
and some of the taverns, so that one has some material with which to
help out one's imagination. But this road that we are walking in always
baffles me. It looks so old and yet is, for the most part, so new that I
find it impossible to make a satisfactory picture of its appearance,
say, when Sir Roger de Coverley might have strolled in Gray's Inn Walks,
or farther back, when Francis Bacon had chambers in the Inn.
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