This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means his
mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It
was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with counterfeit coin,
and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was to become a party to the
circulation of such currency. My fetish of intellectual integrity went
down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no longer young and
distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and
irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a
syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen
letters to Western universities and had half pledged myself to sketch out
a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion.
In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered my
perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the murderer
back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph celebrating
Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon
somebody; and her own letters--she overwhelmed me with them--spared me no
detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of
Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college
professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before
met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, which
cast a sudden light on the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in
motion.
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