When the lecturer at last rose to reply, the guiding phrases of his discourse were the worn familiar keys of a past experience. Used for the second time at the doors of the chambers they had opened within the background of life, they grated, hesitating, and the heavy sound threw the bright spaces into shadow and spread a film of doubt over Miriam’s eagerness to escape and share her illumination with people waiting outside in the surrounding gloom. The light would return and remain for her. But it was something accomplished unaccountably. The mere reproduction of the magic phrases, even when after solitary peaceful contemplation she should have reassembled them in their right relations and their marvellously advancing sequence, would not carry her hearers along the road she had travelled. The something that held them together, lively and enlivening, was incommunicable.
“Don’t huggy away. The audience will take a considerable time to disperse.”
Miriam desired only to escape into the night. Just outside, in