My hostess looked shocked. "She is excessively modest and retiring. She
says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she only
does it for the baby."

Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall full
of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a favorite with
these austere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and as we entered a
pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was setting forth to several
dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them with seats.

Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the back
of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once able to
establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to the applause
of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my earlier
recollections.

Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious
discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the stateness of her
theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which she
had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the shots
were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that, for her
purpose, the bull's-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be
flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her
eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick analogous to that of
the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white paper out of his mouth.
From a large assortment of stock adjectives she chose, with unerring
deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and discrimination would most
surely have rejected, fitting out her subject with a whole wardrobe of
slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size. To the invaluable knack of