This she concedes you as an egg warranted to hatch into something you don’t expect, or a bomb likely to burst harmlessly, if disconcertingly, under your chair. For she knows, by diabolic instinct, just what your idea of the scholar is: the conserver of chronologies and sapient conclusions fit chiefly to be waved in pedagogical celebrations or trumpeted at authors’ readings. No such sterile destiny as this for her, as she shall presently “fructify unto you.” “Few can be trusted with an education.” This she tells you with a prodigious lightness of self-assurance. “The true scholar’s sign-manual is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly upon the weather, and compare notes as to ‘whether it is likely to hold up tomorrow,’—this, says Hazlitt, ‘is the end and privilege of a life of study.’” Mark you how humbly she proceeds, this multi-millionaire of the mind. Her intellectual barns are bursting with fatness, her cattle are on a thousand hills; yet she spares you not only the inventory of her acquisitions but any hint of her respect for them. One is smilingly glad to note that sometimes the challenge of the world’s intellectual penury is really too much for her, and she cannot help rushing to the rescue with armies of notable names and historic data. Still she did converse consumedly upon the weather also, and it is one of the happy incredibilities of her delightful disposition that she never repudiated the intercourse of honest minds, even if they were dull. She adroitly refrained from tossing them the ball she knew they could never return, though with a curve imperfectly transcribed. She talked with them about dogs and mushrooms—for there also she was sapient in a lore that could be worn lightly and the more easily concealed—and the merciful recipe for killing a lobster painlessly before you plunge him in the ensanguining pot, of kittens and young furry donkeys and the universal boon of weather. And she had a store of absurdities, never anecdotes in the dire sense of cut-and-dried obstructors of the traffic between mortal minds, but odd quips and spontaneous incongruities she was ready to shower you withal. No less pretentious scholar ever walked a world more suavely aware of her gracious charm, more happily oblivious of the breaches she could make in worn conventions if she brought up her artillery.