Ah, this was living! Why, at home he knew scarcely a person who had read more of Shakespeare than the quarrel scene in the Fifth Reader. Surely it was good fortune that had made his father and Judge Thornton playmates in boyhood. And to go with Nellie Thornton, too! "Paint out that sign!" he heard some one say. "And what goes in the place of it, sir?" asked the painter. "'Thornton & Smith,'" replied the judge's voice. "My son-in-law, Mr. Smith, has been taken into the firm." The stenographer saw exaltation in his face as he closed the safe, bade her good night and went home. As he sat beside Nellie that evening, he remembered the fancied colloquy between her father and the imaginary painter, and shuddered as he contemplated the possibility of thought-transference and of its ruinous potentialities. As a protection against telepathy he gave his whole attention to Judge Thornton's paper on _Lear_. The indescribable agony of the old king's frenzy, the whirling tempest of the tragedy in which he wandered to his doom clutched at the boy's heart. The wolfish Goneril and Regan, the sweet Cordelia, the bared gray head, the storm, the night--By some occult warning John Smith knew that Nellie was not pleased with his absorption, and that the discussion had begun. "This treatment is _so_ original," said the lady president. "Everybody must be full of questions. Now let us have a perfectly free discussion--don't wait to be called upon, please!" To John Smith the lady president seemed enthusiasm personified; yet only a few people rose, and these merely said how much they had enjoyed the paper. John Smith could see himself on his feet pouring forth comment and exposition, but he sat close, hoping that no adverse fate might direct the lady president's attention to him. The discussion was dragging; one could tell that from the increasing bubbliness of the lady president's enthusiasm as she strove conscientiously to fulfil her task of imposing culture upon society. "I'm sure there must be something more," she said. "Perhaps the most precious pearl of thought of the evening awaits just one more dive. Mrs. Brunson, can you not--" "I always feel presumptuous," said Mrs. Brunson, hoarsening her voice to the pitch she always adopted in public speaking, "when I differ from other commentators. But I also feel that the true critic must put himself in the place of the character under examination. Isn't there a good deal of justification for Goneril and Regan? I do not see, personally, how Lear could be supposed to need all those hundred knights, with their drinking and roistering and dogs and--and all that. I believe Lear's fate was of his own making, and--" John Smith, the unsophisticated, was startled. The unutterable fate of "the old, kind king"--could this Olympian circle hold such treason?