XIII

The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely
Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a
better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other
members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a
place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house
had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a
black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all
accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I
was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate
wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men struggling, with
inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious
conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or
able men.

At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took
haschisch, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and
had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the
Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new
prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young
Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a
certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it
upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room
was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni
Indians with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian who,
irritated by some white man's praise of telephone and telegraph, cried
out, "Can they do that?" and cast above his head two handfuls of sand that
burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He
professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me
the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of
men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was
presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men
and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor
lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting
and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the
_Symposium_; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic
fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving somewhere in an
unfur