Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/87

 himself, too, poor soul,' said Mr. Fox. 'The wise ones on earth pay a terrible price for their wisdom.' Occasionally little Dr. Holmes would come frisking in; he was as merry as a cricket and bubbling over with stories about his medical students at Harvard where he said he did not have a 'chair,' merely a 'settee.' Professor Longfellow at first disappointed her. She had expected a tall man, and thought his large, beautiful head misplaced on his smallish body. Later she, like every one else, thought him the handsomest of men.

All that fall, as the yellow leaves dropped from the elm trees on the Common and the chill in the air at last forced the ladies to assume their Paisley shawls, Lanice heard continually of a new and spectacular star that had risen in England. This wonder had the commonplace name of Anthony Jones. The man had been a captain in India, and had, six years before, been sent North into Arabia to buy breeding-stock for the Indian cavalry. Instead he, and the regiment's money, had remained in Arabia. Something in the man, no one knew quite what, had appealed to the Bedouin tribes and he had mastered their language, for he was a born linguist. He had become a Mohammedan and some sort of a prince. His translations from the brutish but beautiful Arab poetry, 'Garden of the Jin,' had made a name for him in eclectic literary circles and the stamina and courage the man had shown in forcing his wild tribesmen to