[...] I just kept on tapping at this ring pull and finally Terence Stone threw me out of the classroom. Very politely, of course. Terence Stone was always very polite and gracious, and still is it seems: ‘I don’t recall the incident,’ he writes, ‘but am glad to discover it was a minor emotional upset that was the cause of your agitation and it was not the case that I was boring you to tears.’ I don’t know why he takes it upon himself to use the word ‘minor’ to describe the scale and depth of my feelings, and the irony is not lost on me that the ‘minor’ element in this situation was in fact me. I was the minor and my feelings were not. They were the opposite – they were huge, major, overwhelming, more than I could stand. Why does he refer to them as ‘minor’ in this way? And why is it better that my inability to engage with the lesson was due to a minor emotional upset that was brought about by one of his colleagues fooling around with me rather than by him being a bore, which in fact he could be? Who would take any consolation from being absolved in this way? It’s probably unreasonable of me to be annoyed with Terence Stone, but then again, why would anyone presume to know the measure of somebody else’s feelings? Perhaps he is simply hoping for my sake that the whole episode was just a trifle, one that hardly made a dent on me. [...]