"Ah-h-h!" said the prophetess giving us her hand, and promptly dismissing that limb from her thoughts—we nearly put it in our vest-pocket we were so embarrassed. "Ah-h-h! And where is your centre?"
Just casually like that—just as though she were asking us where was our favorite hotel. In fact, for a wild moment we did think she might mean where did we usually hang out socially, and we almost said that we could generally be found after office-hours in the Press Club playing poker or waiting for a friendly boot-legger. But the slight vestige of sanity remaining to us prevented this final catastrophe, and we managed to stammer out that we were not aware of possessing any centre at all—none to speak of.
"Oh, but you must have a centre," she persisted brightly. "We who are engaged in the sacred service of the arts and muses must have a centre, a guiding beacon leading us ever onward and upward to the stars. Have you no star?"
We hadn't the heart to tell the dear lady that the star to which we generally turned our longing eyes in the service of the arts and muses was the hope that the Business Office of the journal on which we work would increase the weight and thickness of our weekly envelope—(the printer will please not spell this "weakly," however appropriate and true the epithet may be). We did not care to introduce these mercenary considerations, so we said nothing and blushed. We may be a benighted newspaperman, but we retain certain rudiments of delicacy. She smiled on us in imitation of a Pre-Raphaelite madonna, and floated away.
Then we had tea—not right away, but after half an hour or so of pained wonder whether or not we were going to get anything at all, and where the dickens the people were all drifting away to. They disappeared, two or three at a time, and none of them came back. We began to suspect that we were being ostracized, when our hostess came up and collected us.
"Oh, you naughty, naughty man," she said in that mischievous and knowing tone which some married ladies love to adopt towards bachelors, "you don't deserve that I should bother about you at all, but you really must have something to eat. Come out to the dining-room."
We went out to the dining-room, disguising as well as we could our extreme eagerness for vittles of some sort or other; and there we found that assemblage of giant intellects wandering about picking sandwiches and little cakes and cups of tea off the mantel, off the side-board, off the window-sill, off chairs, and even off the stairs in the hall. They were taking their food the way the Twentieth Century Limited takes water, scooping it up on the run. We must have looked a little amazed, for our hostess deigned to explain.
"That is the way we eat now," she said. "We do it spontaneously and almost unconsciously. Mrs. De Frizac-Jones suggested it. She said there was something so gross and premeditated about sitting down deliberately to food. One should eat as the bees sip honey, flitting about from flower to flower."
We said we thought it a very delightful idea—no doubt, the cook does, too. Then we walked six miles and a half around the place trying to get enough to sustain the vital forces till supper-time. We finished up by nearly sitting in a plate of angel-cake. And we were still hungry. It may be a good system for humming-birds, but it has its drawbacks for people gifted with the usual thirty-two feet of internal equipment.
When the sandwiches had at last been all tracked down and destroyed spontaneously and unconsciously, there was a general demand that Mrs. De Frizac-Jones should read something to us. After the usual amount of ah-do-pleasing on our part and no-I-rully-can'ting on hers, she suddenly remembered that she had Mæterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles" with her, and if they rully insisted—and, of course, they rully did.