This was but one of the steps, for she also was shampooed and hot-aired and “treated” and hennatead and brilliantined and ratted and marcelled and puffed as to hair; and her hands, now freed from the cramp of the “keys,” were also soaked and creamed and massaged, while the nails were pumiced and oiled and tinted and polished—and still some more, for the ordeal ended in a bout with depilatories and electric needles.
All these things did Imogene, the charming; not that she liked it, nor that she was vain, but only that her Professors insisted that “the Outer must Express the Inner.”
“All-Is-Youth” and “There-Are-No Wrinkles” are the watchwords of a lady who has “found Herself.”
Wednesdays were set aside for another phase of co-ordination. This day was given over to the Nature-Cure Treatment, in which process she was played upon by vigorous streams of alternating hot and cold water. She was Osteopathed and Exercised. She was warmed in the Sun-Parlor, concentrated under blue glass and aired on the roof garden.
After this she ate a Nature-Cure Luncheon of Almost-Ox-Tail Soup, Near-Meat Salad, and other pretty nearly foods, drinking Roastum Cereal—thus eliminating the poisons of other medical systems, and developing the Cosmic Consciousness.
It was therefore Wednesday evening that the lady drank lemon juice copiously and slept under the Mansard Roof swathed in wet sheets—slept calmly, with an abiding faith in the illuminative power of her Water-Soaked System.
Thursdays, however, were reserved for the higher phases of her intellectual uplift. This day was set apart, as one of the mystics expressed it, for “Interior Decoration.”
This day she immured herself in her boudoir, where, with a roll before rising and a kimona all day long, she gave herself entirely to the “Contemplation of Herself.” For this day were reserved the most mystical books and profounder studies and solemner exercises.
Several hours of this day she gave to “The Secrets of Mental Supremacy,” and in the effort to attain “Consciousness without Thought” she spent many a half hour. Much time she consumed before her mirror in “Meditative Self-Analysis.” Again and again would her lunch grow cold while she was occupied in one of these many expensive Occult or Therapeutical Courses, purchased from leading Wise Men in Illinois. One of these covered Practical Occultism, another was Transcendental Mysticism. In still another she worked upon Rhythmic Inspiration, and yet another she was studying the How to Breathe—but none among them was more profoundly veiled in mystic meaning than the Course on “How to Ascertain the Heart Beat Unit.” At times she was so engaged in “Concentration” that she would fall asleep. At other times she became enthused in the effort to discover the Inner Meaning of the Meaningless. She became very skillful in the Expansion of Self and Manifested the Joy Philosophy every time she enlarged her Aura.
Fridays were set apart for what the lady termed “Expression”—that is to say, Fridays were selected for Social visits and “At homes,” on which day she gave a Manifestation of her several acquirements, making the rounds—that her friends might observe the Outer Beauty from the Radiant Center. This she felt to be the solemn duty of the Elect—that they set up the Joy and Beauty Vibrations in other women.