you
as a new sensation! They bare their back to your whip! They have made
you the fashion! Oh! this funny, funny world of ours!"

Macheson smiled grimly.

"I'll grant you the elements of humour in the situation," he said, "but
you can scarcely expect me to appreciate it, can you? I never came here
to play the mountebank, to provide a new sensation for these tired dolls
of Society. Dick, do you think St. Paul could have opened their eyes?"

Holderness shook his head.

"I don't know," he declared. "They're a difficult class--you see, they
have pluck, and a sort of fantastic philosophy which goes with breeding.
They're not easily scared."

Macheson thought of his friend's words later in the afternoon, when he
stood on the slightly raised platform of the fashionable room where his
lectures were given. Not a chair was empty. Macheson, as he entered,
gazed long and steadily into those rows of tired, distinguished-looking
faces, and felt in the atmosphere the delicate wave of perfume shaken
from their clothes--the indescribable effect of femininity. There were
men there, too, mostly as escorts, correctly dressed, bored, vacuous,
from intent rather than lack of intelligence. Macheson himself,
carelessly dressed from design, his fine figure ill-clad, with untidy
boots and shock hair, felt his anger slowly rising as he marked the stir
which his coming had caused. He to be the showman of such a crowd! It
was maddening! That day he spoke to them without even the ghost of a
smile parting his lips. He sought to create no sympathy. He cracked his
whip with the cool deliberation of a Russian executioner.

... "I was asked the other day," he remarked, "by an enterprising
journalist, what made me decide to come here and deliver these lectures
to you. I did not tell him. It is because I wanted to speak to the most
ignorant class in Christendom. You are that class. If you have
intelligence, you make it the servant of your whims. If you have
imagination, you use it to enlarge the sphere of your vices. You are
worse than the ostrich who buries his head in the sand--you prefer to go
underground altogether....

"As you sit here--with every tick of your jewelled watches, out in the
world of which in your sublime selfishness you know nothing, a child
dies, a woman is given to sin, a man's heart is broken. What do you
care? What do you know of that infernal, that everlasting tragedy of sin
and suffering that seethes around you? Why shoul