After a call to silence, the Swami with the ingratiating smile and good front teeth made an address. It was a mystical, tortuous, rambling discourse which sounded to me a good deal like an advocation of free love. He told what ailed us; he said we didn't love enough. He assured us it was O, so easy to get our slice of the wonderful, all-pervading ether with which we were saturated. We simply didn't know how to use it. He had come to teach us: his the mission to prescribe for us. Electricity had been harnessed, why not love? I shuddered when I thought of the possibilities of a love-trust. Of course it would be cornered by some of the millionaires.
After the address everybody clustered around the dispenser of Oriental pearls. The Swami slipped little printed matters into the palms of the neophytes. They told how farther enlightenment could be attained, on given days at given hours and given prices.
Later our brute element was fortified by wafers and a mysterious punch. I felt sorry for the late-comers who missed the intellectual feed and arrived just in time for the refreshments. Wafers are not very sustaining. The punch was a mysterious and subtle concoction with a tendency to promulgate the tenets of the Swami's new religion. Before we took our leave I thought the eyes of the new disciples had grown more languishing and were considerably lit up. It may have been, of course, that the Swami had taken the lid off a few vats of his cerulean ether which was too highly rarefied for those present. As we closed the door and stepped out into the winter night, we instinctively inhaled the cold air, which, though it may not be full of love, is full of common-sense ozone.
"When Boston people want to be naughty they go to New York." Our hostess nodded sententiously across the table as she made the statement.
"Why confine it to Boston? Why not Philadelphia, Washington or ——?"
"Because I don't know anything about those cities, and I do know my home city," interrupted his wife.
"I guess you're right," Mr. Mollett answered. "It's the same spirit which keeps alive Le Rat Mort, or Maxim's, or any of those resorts in Paris. You rarely meet a Parisian at these show-places. If it were not for the foreigners—principally Americans and English—they'd have to shut up shop."
"That's precisely my contention. One does things in Paris or New York one would never think of in Boston."
Will had met Mr. Mollett at a Lambs' Gambol one Sunday night during the recent season in New York. They had taken a shine to each other, to use Mr. Mollett's expression, and had exchanged cards. "I liked your husband from the start," Mr. Mollett once said to me. "He's not a bit like an actor; he's natural and not a bit of a poseur." It appears that when anyone wants to pay an actor a particularly high compliment he tells him he is not a bit like an actor! This is not flattering to the rank and file of players, who labour under the misapprehension that to be effective they must act on and off the stage.
On the opening night of the following season in Boston Will was pleased to find a card from Mr. Mollett and a note from his wife, asking whether I was in town; if so, would I waive the formality of a call and join them at "beans" on Saturday night after the performance.