“What fun it must have been,” Billie remarked. “If you wanted to write anything in those days, you just picked up a handful of mud and made a little brick out of it, and wrote away with a stick, didn’t you?”
“Stylus, my boy, stylus,” corrected the Dean absently. “Yes, it did away with much of our modern detail.”
“Where’s the statue, Uncle Bart?” Kit asked.
“It’s just behind you, my dear. And it’s perfect. Perfect,” murmured the Dean.
Kit turned, expecting to face one of the usual blandly smiling Egyptian pieces of art, with a few wings scattered over it here and there. But instead, there stood in the center of the table a strangely attenuated figure about three feet high. It had a head that was a cross between an intelligent antelope and a rather toplofty baby rat. Its arms were extended at sharp angles, and seemed to be pointing in arch accusation at someone. Wings spread fanwise from the shoulders, and its feet were like those of a griffin.
“I never thought it would look just like that, did you, Billie?” Kit asked confidentially, when they started back to the campus later.
“Well, I knew what to expect, because we’ve been going to the Smithsonian Institute pretty often,” replied Billie. “Some of them look worse than that. But they can’t beat our own Alaskan and Mexican ones. I wonder what people were thinking about back in those days to worship that sort of thing?”
But Kit caught sight of five of the girls just rounding the corner and she waved to them to come over, much to Billie’s inward disgust. While he thoroughly approved of Kit, he viewed the average girl with indifference. But Kit introduced him in a casual manner which put him at his ease, and when they started up the path, it was Tony Conyer who had taken possession of Billie, and was interesting him by telling of her father’s big stock farm in northern Wisconsin.
They found Frank Howard waiting for them outside the boys’ dorm and Clayton was with him. The girls got Kit aside and Amy faced her accusingly.
“You never told us a word about this boy,” she declared, “and all the time you’ve had him up your sleeve. Explain please.”