“I was saying what was in my mind, O Knowing One,” she replied. “But I am sorry now that I spoke. Your question seemed to touch a spring—the spring of ‘high truth.’ High truth, I fear, is a rude, uncivilized thing—most of us keep it thoroughly well guarded—I apologize for employing it here. But—” she fastened him with her motherly smile, “please don’t talk so confidently of the dull pleasures of the mob. Perhaps, as you suggest, Browning and Swinburne touch only the ultra-violet mind; talk about that, it is within your sphere; but until you know more about people, let the mob alone. To know the secret you have to be a mob yourself.... Forgive me for talking straight out, Professor. It is an uncultivated thing to do, I know; but it is right in the spirit of the mob, one of its dull pleasures.... I must go.... If I stay I’ll break out, and then someone would have to read me the riot act.... You’re a first-rate book, Professor; I should enjoy you—on a shelf; but you have never really been. Goodby.”
Of course Blynn turned the event to account and made several quick epigrams out of the affair.
“The audience cheered my little sallies,” he wrote, “which I accepted as proof of their regard—a vote of confidence, as it were, after a thundering attack from the opposition. Everyone apologized and told me that I had handled the situation with proper urbanity. No one seems to know her. She is not a member of the Alpha Women’s Club. But I’m glad she spoke out; to tell the truth, my dull lecture was boring even me!”
The newspapers got a story out of the interruption; and for a nine-days the cartoonist played up professors and “the dull pleasures of the mob.” One of the hits in a touring musical comedy company had its source here.
“Are you happy, Mike?”
“Sure, perfesser, I’m happy; ain’t I got a headache!”
Gorgas wrote a single sentence of disapproval of the lady’s rudeness and in postscript inquired, “How old is she?”
And Blynn came back with an imitation of the laconic note.
“Dear Gorgas: She was not rude, but enchanting.
“P. S. She is as old as truth, which is ever young and beautiful.”