Then, as in a flash, Ellen had seemed to understand the sense of something strange and bewildering in the experience of the past hour, for she then remembered that when she had stood facing her audience in the moment before she began to speak, she had seemed to forget her notes, her listeners and herself, and to apprehend the meaning of her four years at Bryn Mawr so clearly that it came to have for her a sort of personal identity. Carried beyond herself by her delight in the assurance of something actual, she had spoken unpremeditated thoughts. One might almost say, she thought, that the memories revived by the visit to Bryn Mawr, then crowded out by her intense preoccupation in the business of the convention had, as in revenge, taken possession of her, forcing all other thoughts from her--had almost as it were expressed themselves. Much that had puzzled her in Major Cartwright's criticism was now explained. A trick of memory accounted for all--even her triumph. But she could recall nothing of her speech. The words were forever lost. She had been overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all, and, do what she would, she could not keep her thoughts from wandering from the Major's eager questions of her father's doings to her own perplexing experience. At one moment she had seemed to be on the point of remembering the speech, to have the words on the tip of her tongue; the next to lose them more surely than ever. Though the Major was constantly bringing it to mind she was none the wiser for his references. That he had thought well of it she could not doubt, but she wanted to know what she had said. Long after she had gone to her room that night she had sat thinking. The poetry of college spirit! What had she said about it? Perhaps she had said something absurd, had made her subject ridiculous. It hardly seemed so from what she had heard. And yet,--could she think that the inspiration of that moment of discovery had lasted through an hour of unconsciousness? How much more probable that the shadowy something she had tried to define had been so real to the memory or the imagination of her hearers that the mere mention of it had for them an instant fascination. And now this morning, finding herself the first downstairs, she had picked up the paper. She would find out at last. A few moments ago she had finished reading, and throwing the paper aside with the impatience of disappointment, had stepped out on to the porch. In those five minutes she had come to view the whole thing with a lively enjoyment.