The Pelican

She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose
and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple
that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the
outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear
lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real
thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic
problem.

I don't think nature had meant her to be "intellectual;" but what can a
poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly six
months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather's edition
of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the creditors?

Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in
blank verse on "The Fall of Man;" one of her aunts was dean of a girls'
college; another had translated Euripides--with such a family, the poor
child's fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband's
debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after some
hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was
unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.

They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her she
was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden china
and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccupied with their spring
bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies assembled to
hear her had given me to understand that she was "doing it for the baby,"
and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper lip and the
bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to listen leniently to
her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was still, if I may use
the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as walking down a museum-
gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later
complications--the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of
Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of
the erudite--still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific
critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the
Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without
danger of losing his way.

Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious but inaccurate memory, and an
extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not remember--
wrongly; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers of rhetoric
that their infirmities were imperceptible to her friendly critics.
Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had translated
Euripides; and the mere sound of