"Laugh, ladies, laugh," he said with a voice which despite its weakness shook his narrow chest. "Persons in your position may well laugh; for a life full of activity and vigour lies ahead of you. I may rejoice, too, for I am permitted to speak to you as soul to soul; which is a piece of good fortune that rarely falls to the lot of a novice in the teaching profession. You will find that out from your own experience soon enough." The class grew still as a mouse. From that moment on he had the girls in his grip. "But that's not the whole of my good fortune," he continued. "The theme which the authorities of this institution have entrusted to my slender ability--whether from magnanimity toward me, or lack of respect for the subject, I cannot say--is the highest theme which human tradition knows. Every personal expression in history, however defiant, revolutionary, or alien the voice of the chosen one that uttered it, later exegesis used as moral fodder with which to satiate the masses. The only personages with whom this did not succeed were the men of the Renaissance. The nine times wise branded Plato as a shield bearer of Christianity, Horace as a pedant, Augustine as a church saint, Jesus as the Son of God. But no one has ever undertaken to make of Michael Angelo, of Alexander Borgia, of Machiavelli, anything but an ego, an ego which faces surrounding conditions and the world either as creator or destroyer, relying on the fulness of his own power." The young souls sat up and listened. Never had anyone spoken to them in such a tone. They felt he was talking his life away, but in the very moment they realised this, they drew a chain of freemasonry about him with which they shielded him. He continued. With bold rapid strokes, which wrung new life from the dead, he pictured to them the time and the men. The accumulation of many years of repression now burst from him in passionate utterance. His auditors suspected that here was more than a school lesson, more, even, than the harvest of scholarship. They divined that they were listening to a confession of faith; and they attached themselves to him with all the rapturous abandon of a woman and pupil, most rapturous when they did not understand. Lilly being one of the younger girls sat nearest to the instructor. She had a vague feeling, as of a flood of new, ineffably beautiful melodies being poured over her. Since everything in her life and imagination had hitherto centred about music, she had first to translate pictures and thoughts into the world of sound, before her perceptions could grasp them.