7. CONFERENCEI fancy all of us had expected the meeting to be simply a kind of briefing talk. Just times, course instructions, the day’s objective—that kind of thing. Certainly I had no expectation of the food for thought that we received.
It was held in a small lecture-theatre lit for the occasion by an arrangement of car headlamps and batteries. When we went in, some half-dozen men and two women who appeared to have constituted themselves a committee were conferring behind the lecturer’s desk. To our surprise we found nearly a hundred people seated in the body of the hall. Young women predominated at a ratio of about four to one. I had not realized until Josella pointed it out to me how few of them were able to see.
Michael Beadley dominated the consulting group by his height. I recogn
