[88]
]CHAPTER VIII
INTELLECTUAL FREAKS
In the most tragic and most trying moments of life it is well to turn aside from one’s sorrows and refresh one’s mind and strengthen one’s soul by gazing upon the follies of others. Those others gaze on ours.
In my spiritual adventures I have met many amazingly freakish people. Ten years ago the Theosophical Society overflowed with them. They were cultured without being educated, credulous but without faith, bookish but without learning, argumentative but without logic. The women, serene and grave, swam about in drawing-rooms, or they would stand in long, attitudinising ecstasies, their skimpy necks emerging from strange gowns, their bodies as shoulderless as hock bottles. The men paddled about in the same rooms, but I found them less amusing than the women.
“You were a horse in your last incarnation,” said a fuzzy-haired giantess to me one evening, two minutes after we had been introduced.
“Oh, how disappointing!” I exclaimed. “I had always imagined myself an owl. I often dream I was an owl. I fly about, you know, or sit on branches with my eyes shut.”
“No; a horse!” shouted the giantess, with much asperity. “I’m not arguing with you. I’m merely telling you. And I don’t think you were a very nice horse either.”
“No? Did I bite people?”
“Yes; you bit and kicked. And you did other disagreeable things besides. Now, I was a swan.”
[89]
]I evinced a polite but not enthusiastic interest.
“You would make an imposing swan,” I observed.