Nobody laughed this time. It was not that the room had been persuaded; it was that the room had not understood one word in five, and had understood perfectly that a young woman in a turned pelisse had just told Sir Augustus Threlkeld, in his own lecture, that his tables were wrong. There was no precedent for it. The room did not know what it was supposed to do, and so for a moment it did nothing at all.
Sir Augustus recovered first. He had been answering questions in public for forty years.
"My dear young lady," he said, still smiling, "I am sure you have read a great deal. It does you every credit. But you will allow that a method which has been eleven years in the making, and has passed under the eyes of more than one Fellow of the Royal Society, is not likely to have been overset by a sign that a schoolgirl might detect between the soup and the fish." A ripple went round the gallery. "The chalk is at your disposal, of course. I would not deny a lady anything. But I would not wish you to be made uncomfortable in front of so many people."
He gestured at the ledge of the black board, with a little bow, the way a man gestures a lady towards a chair he is quite certain she will not take.
She would have to walk down to it. It was perhaps twenty steps, down the side of the benches and across the open floor before the table, with every eye in the room upon her back. She found she could not move. It was not fear, precisely. It was something more like the body's refusal to believe it was being asked to do a thing so entirely outside its experience.
Then the man in the blue coat stood up.
He was tall, and brown in the face in the way that only years of weather made a man brown, and he had a scar through his left eyebrow that gave him a look of perpetual mild enquiry. He did not look at her. He walked to the board, took up a stick of chalk from the ledge, and came back with it across the open floor and up the side of the benches to the end of the fourth row, where he held it out to her as gravely as if it had been a sword surrendered on a quarterdeck.
"Ma'am," he said.
His voice was quite low. Only she, and possibly Mrs. Gage, could have heard what he said next. "I should very much like to see it."
She took the chalk. It was warm from his hand. She went down.
* * *
Afterwards, a good many people in London claimed to have been at the Institution that night, and most of them told it wrong. They said that she had covered the board in Greek. They said that she had fainted at the end, or that Sir Augustus had,