It was terribly awkward for me. I never saw the horrible little man again, and Angela didn’t know his address; nor did anyone. The more I swore I had never taken lessons, the more people thought I was trying to spare their feelings, and (probably) that I was saying the most dreadful things about them behind their backs. I remonstrated with Archie, but he was in one of his most idiotic moods, and wouldn’t talk to me at all—just made faces at me, as if I was understanding exactly what he meant. Then there began to be trouble, because somebody, Heaven knows who, repeated a piece of scandal about a woman I knew, which we all thought quite baseless, and she came to hear of it: upon which she marched straight off to me and said it was a monstrous breach of trust for me to have repeated what I saw her thinking about the other day, because she was thinking it strictly in confidence. Several things happened like that, which reduced me to despair, and besides, I began to get such a very bad opinion of my neighbours. Archie Lock swore that he had looked hard at a man in his club one day, and the man immediately left for South America.
If only people would have taken it the other way, and tested me, they could have seen at once that I had no unusual powers; but they were all too frightened, especially because Angela had repeated the idea that it was the thoughts you tried hardest to hide which became most obvious to the mind-reader. Then people began coming to me very quietly and asking me either to tell them Mr. Griggs’s address or to give them lessons myself. And when I explained that I couldn’t do either, they took it very badly: and one friend of mine, who was always very jealous about her husband, cut me dead ever after she failed to get the “secret” out of me. Of course my real friends believed in me, but it is surprising how few one’s real friends prove to be on such occasions! Porstock was away in America, and I was too proud to ask him to come back. What amazed me was the credulity of the most intelligent people about it. I was actually asked to a very important Foreign Office dinner, where I was put next to the American ambassador; and I was asked afterwards, very confidentially, what he had been thinking about!