As for useful experience, this afternoon tea reminds me of those lower social gatherings where liquor is, or used to be, sold only to be drunk on the premises. Granting that I become a finished tea-goer, easy of speech, nodding, laughing, secure in the graceful manipulation of my tea-things, never upsetting my tea, never putting my sandwich in the way of an articulating tongue, yet is all this experience of no use whatever to me except at other afternoon teas. I go to school simply to learn how to go to school. The most finished and complete tea-goer, if he behaves anywhere else as he does at an afternoon tea, creates more widely the same unfavorable impression that he creates, in his own proper sphere, on me. Can I then reasonably regard experience as useful which I observe to be useful only for doing something which I observe to be useless? The soap agrees that I cannot. Yet, says the sponge, _if_ I might hope at some afternoon tea to discover my immortal soul, the case would be different; this experience would be valuable. O foolish sponge! I am compelled to tell you that at afternoon teas it is especially difficult for a mortal gentleman to believe that he has any immortal soul to look for. It is a gathering essentially mundane and ephemeral. For it we put on our most worldly garments. For it we practise our most worldly smirks in dumb rehearsal before our mirror and an audience of one silly, attentive image, thinking that this time, this time--But it is always the same: the observant mind in the immovable body. As for the immortal soul, O sponge! it may, and doubtless does, go to strange places--but it _cannot be dragged_.
And so we come to the final question: is the afternoon tea a place where one featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus _Homo_ may meet another whom he might hope some time to call a friend? I do not mean 'my friend What's-his-name?' but rather such another biped as Tennyson had in mind when he wrote,--
Since we deserved the name of friends And thine effect so lives in me, A part of mine may live in thee And move thee on to noble ends.
I grant you, peering out of my tub at the world, that there are many to whom this thought sounds sublimated and extravagant: a poet says this sort of thing because such is his poetic business. We come nearer perhaps to the universal understanding in John Hay's definition that 'Friends are the sunshine of life'; for it is equally true that all men seek sunlight and that every man seeks a friend after his own kind and nature. The best and most intelligent of us admit the rarity and value of friendship; the worst and most ignorant of us are unwittingly the better for knowing some friendly companion. But these afternoon teas are inimical to friendship; and the first duty of a hostess is to separate, expeditiously and without hope of again coming together, any other two guests who appear to be getting acquainted. On this count, even were we not Automaton Tea-Goers, debarred by inherent stability from any normal human intercourse, the afternoon tea must prove more disheartening than helpful. We might at best glimpse a potential friend as the desert islander sights a passing sail on the far horizon.