a grey flannel shirt and who,
at intervals, delivered himself of the most astonishing poems, vague,
unrhymed, unmetrical lucubrations, incoherent, bizarre; now a Christian
Scientist, a lean, grey woman, whose creed was neither Christian nor
scientific; now a university professor, with the bristling beard of
an anarchist chief-of-section, and a roaring, guttural voice, whose
intenseness left him gasping and apoplectic; now a civilised Cherokee
with a mission; now a female elocutionist, whose forte was Byron's Songs
of Greece; now a high caste Chinaman; now a miniature painter; now a
tenor, a pianiste, a mandolin player, a missionary, a drawing master,
a virtuoso, a collector, an Armenian, a botanist with a new flower, a
critic with a new theory, a doctor with a new treatment.

And all these people had a veritable mania for declamation and fancy
dress. The Russian Countess gave talks on the prisons of Siberia,
wearing the headdress and pinchbeck ornaments of a Slav bride; the
Aesthete, in his white cassock, gave readings on obscure questions
of art and ethics. The widow of India, in the costume of her caste,
described the social life of her people at home. The bearded poet,
perspiring in furs and boots of reindeer skin, declaimed verses of his
own composition about the wild life of the Alaskan mining camps. The
Japanese youth, in the silk robes of the Samurai two-sworded nobles,
read from his own works--"The flat-bordered earth, nailed down at night,
rusting under the darkness," "The brave, upright rains that came down
like errands from iron-bodied yore-time." The Christian Scientist, in
funereal, impressive black, discussed the contra-will and pan-psychic
hylozoism. The university professor put on a full dress suit and lisle
thread gloves at three in the afternoon and before literary clubs and
circles bellowed extracts from Goethe and Schiler in the German, shaking
his fists, purple with vehemence. The Cherokee, arrayed in fringed
buckskin and blue beads, rented from a costumer, intoned folk songs of
his people in the vernacular. The elocutionist in cheese-cloth toga and
tin bracelets, rendered "The Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho
loved and sung." The Chinaman, in the robes of a mandarin, lectured
on Confucius. The Armenian, in fez and baggy trousers, spoke of the
Unspeakable Turk. The mandolin player, dressed like a bull fighter, held
musical conversaziones, interpreting the peasant songs of Andalusia.

It was th