So he took reasonable measures of reprisal. He moved from her house; he began to take for himself the patients who came for Personal Consultations, and to meet them in the parlor of his new boarding-house in Harlem. And when she was not present at his Euterpean Hall meetings, he brought back to Victory Thought-power Headquarters only so much of the collection as, after prayer and meditation and figuring on an envelope, seemed suitable.
That did it.
Mrs. Evans Riddle had a regrettable suspiciousness. She caused a marked twenty-dollar bill to be placed in the collection at vespers, a year after Elmer had gone to work for the higher powers, and when he brought her the collection-money minus the twenty dollars, she observed loudly, with her grinning swami looking heathenish and sultry across the room:
“Gantry, you’re a thief! You’re fired! You have a contract, but you can sue and be damned. Jackson!” A large negro houseman appeared. “Throw this crook out, will you?”
III
He felt dazed and homeless and poor, but he started out with Prosperity Classes of his own.
He did very well at Prosperity, except that he couldn’t make a living out of it.
He spent from a month to four months in each city. He hired the ballroom of the second-best hotel for lectures three evenings a week, and advertised himself in the newspapers as though he were a cigarette or a brand of soap:
His students were school-teachers who wanted to own tearooms, clerks who wanted to be sales-managers, clergymen who wanted to be newspapermen, newspapermen who wanted to be real estate dealers, real estate dealers who wanted to be bishops, and widows who wanted to earn money without loss of elegance. He lectured to them in the most beautiful language, all out of Mrs. Riddle’s magazine.