Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/196

 against a broken cypress was a lovely, headless nymph fleeing with outstretched arms. Lanice recognized it as the one of which Mamma had sent a picture for the stereoscope.

'Greek, I think,' said Roger; 'late Greek, but once it belonged to some member of the Medici family. They made that inappropriate rococo base for it and the family crest on it.'

'I wish it had a head,' said Lanice. To a young woman trained as she was trained, it was hard to know where to look at a nude statue if the head was gone.

'Do you know, I believe I'm glad it hasn't. It would have been one of those flat, dish faces with lumpy hair. You can see hundreds of them in museums. Often a curator tries to combine headless bodies and bodiless heads, and fathers archæological monsters. Now the head I see for this nymph is wholly individual and utterly lovely. But come, see my other god, and see what has happened to his head.'

A sturdy, red sandstone Pan of doubtful lineage held up towards his mouth his marsyas pipes, but the head, evidently cut from a separate block, rolled on the gravel and leered up with wicked slit eyes.

'This head fell off when I was in America,' he said. 'I haven't put it back because I used to feel rather unhappy at nights thinking how Pan was alone here with my frightened Greek. His leer was so lewd, and she, poor child, without an inch of clothing, not even a face to turn away from his gaze. So when Nature, or Zeus, or the intensity of his passions finally popped