To Mrs. Philip Harris, in the big house looking out across the lake, the
passing days brought grateful reassurance.... Betty was safe--Miss Stone
was well again--and the man had not come.... She breathed more freely
as she thought of it. The child had told her that she had asked him.
But she had forgotten to give him her address; and it would not do to
be mixed up with a person like that--free to come and go as he liked.
He was no doubt a worthy man. But Betty was only a child, and too easily
enamoured of people she liked. It was strange how deep an impression
the man’s words had made on her. Athens and Greece filled her waking
moments. Statues and temples--photographs and books of travel loaded
the school-room shelves. The house reeked with Greek learning. Poor Miss
Stone found herself drifting into archaeology; and an exhaustive study
of Greek literature, Greek life, Greek art filled her days. The
theory of Betty Harris’s education had been elaborately worked out by
specialists from earliest babyhood. Certain studies, rigidly prescribed,
were to be followed whether she liked them or not--but outside these
lines, subjects were to be taken up when she showed an interest in them.
There could be no question that the time for the study of Greek history
and Greek civilisation had come. Miss Stone laboured early and
late. Instruction from the university down the lake was pressed into
service.... But out of it all the child seemed, by some kind of precious
alchemy, to extract only the best, the vital heart of it.
The instructor in Greek marvelled a little. “She is only a child,” he
reported to the head of the department, “and the family are American of
the newest type--you know, the Philip Harrises?”
The professor nodded. “I know--hide and hoof a generation back.”
The instructor assented. “But the child is uncanny. She knows more about
Greek than--”
“Than _I_ do, I suppose.” The professor smiled indulgently. “She
wouldn’t have to know much for that.”
“It isn’t so much what she _knows_. She has a kind of _feeling_ for
things. I took up a lot of photographs to-day--some of the _later_
period mixed in--and she picked them out as if she had been brought up
in Athens.”
The professor looked interested. “Modern educational methods?”
“As much as you like,” said the instructor. “But it is something more.
When I am with the child I am in Athens itself. Chicago makes me blink
when I come out.”
The professor laughed. The next day he made an appointment to go himself
to see the child. He was a famous epigraphist and an authority in his
subject. He had spent years in Greece--with his nose, for the most part,
held close to bits of parchment and stone.
When he came away, he was laughing softly. “I am going over for a year,”
he said, when he met the instructor that afternoon in the corridor.
“Did you see the little Harris girl?” asked the instructor.
The professor paused. “Yes, I saw her.”
“How did she strike you?”
“She struck me dumb,” said the professor. “I listened for the best
part of an hour while she expounded things to me--asked me questions I
couldn’t answer, mostly.” He chuckled a little. “I felt like a fool,” he
added, frankly, “and it felt good.”
The instructor smiled. “I go through it twice a week. The trouble seems
to be that she’s alive, and that she thinks everything Greek is alive,
too.”
The professor nodded. “It’s never occurred to her it’s dead and done
with, these thousand years and more.” He gave a little sigh. “Sometimes
I’ve wondered myself whether it is--quite as dead as it looks to you and
me,” he added. “You know that grain--wheat or something--that Blackman
took from the Egyptian mummy he brought over last spring--”
“Yes, he planted it--”
“Exactly. And all summer he was tending a little patch of something
green up there in his back yard--as fresh as the eyes of Pharaoh’s
daughter ever looked on--”
The instructor opened his eyes a little. This was a wild flight for the
head epigraphist.
“That’s the way she made me feel--that little Harris girl,” explained
the professor--“as if my mummy might spring up and blossom any day if I
didn’t look out.”
The instructor laughed out. “So you’re going over with it?”
“A year--two years, maybe,” said the professor. “I want to watch it
sprout.”