Trix crumbled her bread, still smiling at the recollection.
“Well, the lecture was held in a biggish room, and there were a lot of odd people present. But the oddest of all was the lecturer. She wore a kind of purple velvet tea-gown, though it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. She talked for a long time about vibrations, and things that bored me awfully, and people kept interrupting with questions. One man interrupted particularly often. He kept saying, ‘Excuse me, but am I right in thinking—’ And then he would give a little lecture on his own account, and look around for the approval of the audience. I should have flung things at him if I had been the purple velvet lady. It was so obvious that he was not desiring her information, but merely wishful to air his own. There was a text on the wall which said, ‘We talk abundance here,’ and when I pointed out to Sybil how true it was, she wasn’t a bit pleased, and said it didn’t mean what I thought in the least. But she wouldn’t explain what it did mean. After the lecture, the purple velvet lady held things—jewelry chiefly—that people in the audience sent up to her, and described their owners, and where they’d got the things from. There was quite a lot of family history, and people’s characteristics and virtues and failings, and very, very private things made public, but no one seemed to mind.”
“That’s the odd thing about those people,” said Doctor Hilary thoughtfully. “Disclosing their innermost thoughts, feelings, and so-called experiences, seems an absolute mania with them. And the more public the disclosure the better they are pleased. But go on, Miss Devereux.”
“Well,” said Trix, “at last she began describing a sort of Cleopatra lady, and—and rather vivid love scenes, and—and things like that. When she’d ended, the bracelet turned out to belong to a little dowdy woman looking like a meek mouse. I thought the purple velvet lady would have been really upset and mortified at her mistake. But she wasn’t in the least. She just smiled sweetly, and returned the bracelet to the owner, and said that the dowdy little woman had been Cleopatra in a former incarnation. Of course when she began on that tack, I saw the kind of lecture I’d really let myself in for, and I knew I’d no business to be in the place at all, so I made Sybil take me away. It was nearly the end, and she didn’t mind, because she missed the silver collection. But she talked to me about it the whole of tea-time, and she really believed it all,” sighed Trix pathetically.
Miss Tibbutt looked quite shocked.
“Oh, but, my dear, she couldn’t really.”
“She did,” nodded Trix.
Miss Tibbutt appealed helplessly to Father Dormer.
“Why do people believe such extraordinary things?” she demanded almost wrathfully.
Father Dormer laughed. “That’s a question I cannot pretend to answer. But I suppose that if people reject the truth, and yet want to believe something beyond mere physical facts, they can invent anything, that is if they happen to be endowed with sufficient imagination.”