Mr. Achilles | Page 9

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."

VI
ACHILLES CALLS ON BETTY HARRIS
In another week Achilles Alexandrakis had made ready to call on Betty Harris. There had been many details to attend to--a careful sponging and pressing of his best suit, the purchase of a new hat, and cuffs and collars of the finest linen--nothing was too good for the little lady who had flitted into the dusky shop and out, leaving behind her the little line of light.
Achilles brushed the new hat softly, turning it on his supple wrist with gentle pride. He took out the music-roll from the drawer and unrolled it, holding it in light fingers. He would carry it back to Betty Harris, and he would stay for a while and talk with her of his beloved Athens. Outside the sun gleamed. The breeze came fresh from the lake. As he made his way up the long drive of the Lake Shore, the water dimpled in the June sun, and little waves lapped the great stones, touching the ear with quiet sound. It was a clear, fresh day, with the hint of coming summer in the air. To the left, stone castles lifted themselves sombrely in the soft day. Grim or flaunting, they faced the lake--castles from Germany, castles from France and castles from Spain. Achilles eyed them with a little smile as his swift, thin feet traversed the long stones. There were turrets and towers and battlements frowning upon the peaceful, workaday lake. Minarets and flowers in stone, and heavy marble blocks that gripped the earth. Suddenly Achilles's foot slackened its swift pace. His eye dropped to the silver tag on the music-roll in his hand, and lifted itself again to a gleaming red-brown house at the left. It rose with a kind of lightness from the earth, standing poised upon the shore of the lake, like some alert, swift creature caught in flight, brought to bay by the rush of waters. Achilles looked at it with gentle eyes, a swift pleasure lighting his glance. It was a beautiful structure. Its red- brown front and pointed, lifting roof had hardly a Greek line or hint; but the spirit that built the Parthenon was in it--facing the rippling lake. He moved softly across the smooth roadway and leaned against the parapet of stone that guarded the water, studying the line and colour of the house that faced him.
The man who planned it had loved it, and as it rose there in the light it was perfect in every detail as it had been conceived--with one little exception. On either side the doorway crouched massive grey- pink lions wrought in stone, the heavy outspread paws and firm-set haunches resting at royal ease. In the original plan these lions had not appeared. But in their place had been two steers--wide-flanked and short-horned, with lifted heads and nostrils snuffling free--something crude, brusque, perhaps, but full of power and quick onslaught. The house that rose behind them had been born of the same thought. Its pointed gable and its facades, its lifted front, had the same look of challenge; the light, firm-planted hoofs, the springing head, were all there--in the soft, red stone running to brown in the flanks.
The stock-yard owner and his wife had liked the design--with no suspicion of the symbol undergirding it. The man had liked it all-- steers and red-brown stone and all--but the wife had objected. She had travelled far, and she had seen, on a certain building in Rome, two lions guarding a ducal entrance.
Now that the house was finished, the architect seldom passed that way. But when he did he swore at the lions, softly,