had the lecture on Ibsen--she had heard it three times already that
winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in the
lecturer's own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the
Cosmogony.

After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved its
chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door opened,
and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!

Some one said "Hush!", the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she
began.

It was like looking at one's self early in the morning in a cracked
mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a
beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced
across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was
looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our
glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that _he was
Lancelot_.

I don't remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of them
to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot's
eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had
sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be
done about it.

The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my
companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and
the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who
had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded