Lord Frederick Leighton Leighton Winding the Skein painting

John William Waterhouse In the Peristyle painting
John Singer Sargent A Dinner Table at Night painting
Lord Frederick Leighton Leighton Winding the Skein painting
He said more; indeed he may have talked the night through, but further than this I knew nothing until Croaker waked me with a gentle touch. My first thought was that I'd dozed off for half a sentence -- Dr. Eierkopf sat on Croaker's shoulders as before, and resumed the conversation as soon as my eyelids opened -- but I discovered that I was lying on a cot, and a large clock on the wall read four and a half hours after midnight. Croaker set a folding screen before me and served up a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, pancakes, and sausage; while I dined (I could not of course stomach the sausage any more than Eierkopf could abide the sight of my eating anything at all) my host spoke on from behind the screen:
"Itis extraordinary how many things point to your being the GILES, except the one thing that proves you're not. And it's almost a pity. You're an interesting young man, a pleasant young man -- but that's not the point." What he meant was that although he assumed the Cum Laude Project to be a cause forever lost, it intrigued him to imagine what WESCAC might have produced had it indeed fertilized some lady with the GILES. Moreover, while he felt certain that he knew what Graduation is, and that he was himself a Graduate, there were admittedly moments when he could almost wish it were something else -- something miraculous after all, as the superstitious held it to be.
"What is Commencement?" I asked him through the screen. Croaker fried