The American Academy pupils talked together to keep everybody off, except when they made their clever jokes ... "if anyone takes that top bit there'll be murder Miss Spink." When they went out of the room they looked silly. The young man was real somewhere else. The little man talking about the wonders of the linotype in the smoking room.... How did I get into the smoking room? Someone probably told Miss Spink I talked to him in the smoking room and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps his wife. If they could have seen. It was so surprising to hear anybody suddenly talking. Perhaps he began in the hall and ushered me into the smoking room. There was no one there and I can't remember anything about the linotype, only the quiet and the talking face and suddenly feeling in the heart of London. But it was soon after that they all began being stand-offish; before Mr. Chamberlayne came; before Adela began playing Esther Summerson at the Kennington. They approved of my going down to fetch her until he began coming too. The shock of seeing her clumsy heavy movements on the stage and her face looking as though it were covered with starch.... I can _think_ about it all, here, and not mind. 6 She _was_ beautiful. It was happiness to sit and watch her smoking so badly, in bed, in the strip of room, her cloud of hair against the wall in the candlelight, two o'clock ... the Jesuit who had taught her chess ... and Michael Somebody, the little book "The Purple Pillar." He was an _author_ and he wanted to marry her and take her back to Ireland. Perhaps by now she was back from America and had gone, just out of kindness. She was strong and beautiful and good, sitting up in her chemise, smoking.... I've got that photograph of her as Marcia somewhere. I must put it up. Miss Spink was surprised that last week, the students getting me into their room ... the dark clean shining piano, the azaleas and the muslin shaded lamp, the way they all sat in their evening dresses, lounging and stiff with stiff clean polished hair.... "Miss Dust here's going to be the highest soprano in the States." ... "None of that Miss Thicker." ... "When she caught that top note and the gold medal she went right up top, to stay there, that minute."