price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal
education.

I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I
found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot's side. The dimple came out at my
greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the
same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty
demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs.
They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a
moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.

Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat,
with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of
expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful.
It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot's account. Lancelot had been
sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people
didn't tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard afterwards. During
the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and
radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then,
always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic: she
had become a lecturing-machine.

I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared.
I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had
been last heard of as lecturing--still lecturing--but no one seemed to
know when or where.

It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the
oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had
so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had