When I was about nine years old my cousins took me to an entertainment at the girls’ school which all but one of them had lately left. Never shall I forget the awkward fear with which I faced a room full of mature and stately beings for whose benefit the conjurer had been summoned. I wondered how he would dare to conjure lightly before an assembly of so many incarnations of Minerva. There was Olympian superiority upon their brows and their flowing locks were surely ambrosial. The one relief was that to them, apparently, I did not exist, though some younger sprites in shorter skirts giggled embarrassingly when I tripped over a chair. Their accomplishments, too, were miraculous; they played such runs upon the piano and the violin, they recited with such _aplomb_ “The Jackdaw of Rheims,” they even did a German play of which, as I was told many years later by my cousin, none of them understood a word. The goddesses graciously unbent when the conjurer was pleased to be facetious and miraculous after the manner of his kind. He delighted me too, that conjurer, but he was the cause, none the less, of my greater humiliation. He needed an accomplice, or shall we say a butt, upon the stage, and, basely taking advantage of my solitary masculinity, he called me out. The Minervas could no longer ignore my miserable existence. There I was exposed to their censorious gaze, a thing in breeches, a most obvious compound of “toads and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” placed in one of the less dignified positions of this world with no fellow to support me. I held things for the conjurer and they disappeared, I tied knots which were as water, money issued from my nose and perspiration from my forehead. I had to assure the goddesses that I saw no deception, as if all the assurance to be found in that room was not on their side rather than on mine: I even had to pronounce the ridiculous word “Abracadabra” at the critical moment of a more than usually mystifying illusion. Finally I had to hold a glass of water covered with a silk handkerchief. To my inconsolable despair I dropped the glass, which broke with a hideous crash upon the stage. Blushing scarlet and covered with confusion I was invited to make way for “one of the young ladies who no doubt had a steadier hand than a dissipated young man.” I slunk away into obscurity, hating all conjurers and fearing all big girls more than ever. “Maud is not yet seventeen But she is tall and stately”