door opened, had glanced up without interrupting his talk. Three
other faces turned towards Cavender from across the room. Reuben
Jeffries, a heavyset man with a thin fringe of black hair circling an
otherwise bald scalp, nodded soberly and looked away again. Mavis
Greenfield, a few rows further up, produced a smile and a reproachful
little headshake; during the coffee break she would carefully explain
to Cavender once more that students too tardy to take in Dr. Al's
introductory lecture missed the most valuable part of these meetings.

From old Mrs. Folsom, in the front row on the right, Cavender's
belated arrival drew a more definite rebuke. She stared at him for
half a dozen seconds with a coldly severe frown, mouth puckered in
disapproval, before returning her attention to Dr. Ormond.

Cavender sat down in the first chair he came to and let himself go
comfortably limp. He was dead-tired, had even hesitated over coming to
the Institute of Insight tonight. But it wouldn't do to skip the
meeting. A number of his fellow students, notably Mrs. Folsom, already
regarded him as a black sheep; and if enough of them complained to Dr.
Ormond that Cavender's laxness threatened to retard the overall
advance of the group towards the goal of Total Insight, Ormond might
decide to exclude him from further study. At a guess, Cavender thought
cynically, it would have happened by now if the confidential report
the Institute had obtained on his financial status had been less
impressive. A healthy bank balance wasn't an absolute requirement for
membership, but it helped ... it helped! All but a handful of the
advanced students were in the upper income brackets.

Cavender let his gaze shift unobtrusively about the group while some
almost automatic part of his mind began to pick up the thread of Dr.
Al's discourse. After a dozen or so sentences, he realized that the
evening's theme was the relationship between subjective and objective
reality, as understood in the light of Total Insight. It was a
well-worn subject; Dr. Al repeated himself a great deal. Most of the
audience nevertheless was following his words with intent interest,
many taking notes and frowning in concentration. As Mavis Greenfield
liked to express it, quoting the doctor himself, the idea you didn't
pick up when it was first presented might come clear to you the fifth
or sixth time around. Cavender suspected, however, that as far as he
was concerned much of the theory o