But, without reckoning actual superstitions, what impostors we used to encourage! You would get a card to tell you that Sapphire Countess of Leek would give an At Home to meet Dr. Breder—Dr. Breder was a little German-American who believed that you could live for ever if you ate a raw tomato before each meal. Or you would be invited to hear a lecture in some fashionable boudoir from Mrs. Spink, the Eugenist, who wanted to introduce a system of scientific totemism into England to regulate marriages: I never could understand myself how the principle worked. Or you would call at a friend’s, and find that you had come in in the middle of a long dissertation by a coal-black man in a frock-coat who was explaining the essential superiority of Kaffir to Christian ethics. I was not fond of such movements myself. But, having told so many stories against other people, I must give some account of a very amusing _faux pas_ I myself made, which caused many of my friends to cut me dead for a long time and almost made it necessary for me to retire from London Society altogether.
I was having tea with Angela Nuneaton one afternoon when there was a whistle at the tube, and when she had listened to it she asked if I minded a very curious little man coming in, called Holbeach Griggs, who had invented a system by which you could read people’s thoughts as soon as you looked at them. I said, foolishly, that it sounded rather a rag, so we unslipped the door-catch, and a moment or two later the dictaphone announced Mr. Holbeach Griggs. He was a weedy-looking little man, with nothing mysterious or “Have-you-seen-this-man?” about him. I was introduced, and said I supposed it was a sort of lip-reading he did, by watching the expressions on people’s faces, like Sherlock Holmes in the Watson story. He said not a bit; his system depended on immediate thought-transference: and the fun of it was that the more the other persons tried to conceal their thoughts, the more clearly you could detect them, “because of the inhibition,” he said. It was foolish of me, but in those days, when we were still quite new to the idea of carrying a wireless installation in your umbrella, anything seemed possible in the way of communication with other people: and besides, if what the man said was true, it was obviously a good thing to be first in the field and get ahead of your friends with it. So I not only asked the wretched little creature to give me lessons, but invited him to come round to Chiswick for one of my Fridays and show off (I was always at home at Friday luncheon in those days). He said he would come, and I went away and forgot all about it.