COLLEGE OF ONE

Liza Doolittle had her 'enry 'iggins; Sheilah Graham had her Scottie and he provided her with a liberal arts crash program, novels, plays, history, poetry, philosophy and music during the last two years they spent together. She had been spottily educated when she left an orphanage at fourteen and Scott, even though guttering out, was still ""a flame, warming, illuminating, burning, until the fire was extinguished by his death at forty-four."" Miss Graham, who has already established herself as a kind of vestal virgin of his eternal light, salvaged the notes from Princeton University with the list of books and master plan of study which she pursued with him; he couldn't spell, but he did teach her what a pronoun was and charted shorter and longer pilgrimages through Van Loon and Das Kapital, Gibbon and Waugh's Decline and Fall, greater and lesser novels. Throughout there are notes on what she said, and he said, and what he did, and she did, which of course personalize the curriculum and fill in this cultural appendix to Beloved Infidel. Jonathan Daniels once commented that ""The man who reads only for improvement is beyond the hope of much improvement before he begins."" A thought which may occur here.