We dined with excited and hospitable people and I lectured to an enthusiastic audience. I do not know how it is with professional speakers, but with the amateur the chairman and the audience make the speech. The Rev. Swan Wiers introduced me in an address of eloquence for which I thanked him warmly.
I arrived in Providence next day to be interviewed by three young ladies. After the usual questions upon Princess Mary's underwear and the "flappers," one of them said she had come to ask me about England's greatest man. I told her we had so many that I would be grateful if she could indicate the one she meant.
"Will you tell me who your great men are?" she answered.
"Well," I said, "we have Hardy, Kipling, Lord Morley, Lord Grey, Lord Buckmaster, and Mr. Balfour."
"Oh, no!" she replied, "I want to hear all about Lloyd George."
"I fear you will have to read about him yourself," I said, "and if you can wade through the daily columns of films, flappers, murders and headlines, over here, to our anonymous gossip about Downing Street in my country, you may discover what you want to know."
The other ladies intervened when she retorted:
"Then you refuse to tell me?" and as—the electric light having gone out all over the hotel—we were squinting at a single candle, I thought it as well to put an end to their intelligent questions.
The Providence audience consisted mostly of empty chairs, but it was an enormous hall and when the lecture was over a few of the five hundred listeners came up to ask me to sign my name in various albums and on slips of paper. They said:
"You have given us such a wonderful lecture to-night that you must come back here." To which I replied smilingly: