All over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity
were conniving with me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot
lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was
that, somewhere among the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find
one who would marry her in the defense of his convictions.
None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years
later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing in
Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas. The
following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of
recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean
steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot's triumphs with the
impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind at
the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother
to educate her son.
The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home
the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those
pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves visible
to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her
spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory.
A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst
punishments a worker can undergo--an enforced holiday. The doctors who
pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in
the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and
my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another.
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