But I was soon to find that my troubles had only begun. The class had indeed ceased to perform like one man in astonishment, but various individuals now began to act in fashions unaccountably extraordinary. Not only did resentment at my lecture keep lingering, and growing, on many countenances, and not only did laughter keep bubbling up in others, but now certain more specific eccentricities began exhibiting themselves. A mild instance was the action of one of my most devoted note-takers, a woman who sat on the front row. She had always taken too many notes, as I had observed; she never missed anything important, and she frequently copied down much that was far from important. And now I noticed that in the middle of certain cardinal statements I was making, and even making slowly in order that every one who wanted them in a note-book might have time to get them fully, she took her pen from the paper, and meditatively putting the end of it in her mouth, proceeded to gaze out of the window into vacancy as if trying to think what on earth to write next. But this, as I say, was mild. That particular student was too well-bred to be ruder. So was another girl on the front row who, a little later, laid aside her pen and paper and sank her head for several minutes into her hands in such a way as to make me wonder whether she was suffering from headache or whether she was politely veiling an outbreak of laughter such as certain other members of the class were at no such pains to conceal. Certainly when her face emerged it was clear that she had not even been smiling. She looked at me fixedly for a minute, with such an inquiring though guarded glance as one might give a stranger whom one half suspected of mild lunacy, and then resumed work with her pen. There were numerous examples of similarly harmless but abnormal conduct, and I had no choice but to endure them in wondering patience. But when one sedate and trusted student, also a woman, who sat in the rear of the class, deliberately caught my eye and then impressively laid her finger tightly over her closed lips, thus giving me the unmistakable signal for silence, my astonishment and bewilderment grew amain. What on earth could be wrong with me, I asked myself, that I should be bedevilling my students in this fashion? What absurdity was at the bottom of all this? Had everybody in my class gone crazy? Or had I?