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 the [Greek: ais] and [Greek: ois] that
she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course,
with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to
the hearts of ladies whose only "accomplishment" was French--if you didn't
speak too quickly.

I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months later I
came upon her again in the New England university town where the
celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of a local Parnassus,
with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped on the lower
ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her husband's
death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her father's
lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to
her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, was already esconced in a snug
hollow of the Parnassian slope.

After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs. Amyot.
From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who were
hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at
that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt whether any of my
discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was ever treated to so
ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham erudition and
real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the opening
of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as
possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course