Laboriously Barton went back and reread the phrase to himself. "Oh--oh, yes," he conceded lamely. "Paleontologically," he began all over again. "Oh, dear, no!" he interrupted himself. "I was farther along than that!--Absence of marine saurians? Oh, yes! "Absence of marine saurians," he resumed glibly, "Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs--so abundant in the--in the Cretaceous--of Ammonites and Belemnites," he persisted--heroically. Hesitatingly, stumblingly, without a glimmer of understanding, his bewildered mind worried on and on, its entire mental energy concentrated on the single purpose of trying to pronounce the awful words. "Of Rudistes, Inocerami--Tri--Trigonias," the horrible paragraph tortured on ... "By the marked reduction in the--Brachiopods compared with the now richly developed Gasteropods and--and sinupalliate--Lamellibranchs,"-- it writhed and twisted before his dizzy eyes. Every sentence was a struggle; more than one of the words he was forced to spell aloud just out of sheer self-defense; and always against Eve Edgarton's little intermittent nod of encouragement was balanced that hateful sniffing sound of surprise and contempt from the orchid table in the window. Despairingly he skipped a few lines to the next unfamiliar words that met his eye. "The Neozoic flora," he read, "consists mainly of--of Angio--Angiosper--" Still smiling, but distinctly wan around the edges of the smile, he slammed the handful of papers down on his knee. "If it really doesn't make any difference where we begin, Miss Eve," he said, "for Heaven's sake--let's begin somewhere else!"