God--it is notorious--works in a mysterious way to get morality and
decency into us; which is another way of saying that not all light is
communicated by the Episcopal bench, by clerks in holy orders, by
divines who do not conform, or by editors at Whitefield's Tabernacle.
The other day, for example, I had lunch with a very charming actress in
a pleasant restaurant.
"Rather a funny thing happened the last time I was here," she remarked.
"Yes?" I replied languidly.
"About you."
"Oh!" I said with animation. "Do tell me."
"It was also at lunch," she explained. "The people at the next table
were talking about you. I couldn't help hearing a little. A man there
said he had met you in Shanghai."
"Not really!" I exclaimed.
"Yes. He met you in Shanghai."
"That's frightfully interesting," I said. "What did he say about me?"
"That's what I couldn't hear," she replied. "You see, I had to pay some
attention to my own crowd. I only caught the word 'delightful.'"
Ever since she told me this I have been turning it over in my mind; and
it is particularly vexing not to know more. "Delightful" can be such
jargon and mean nothing--or, at any rate, nothing more than amiability.
Still, that is something, for one is not always amiable, even when
meeting strangers. On the other hand, it might be, from this man, the
highest praise.
The whole thing naturally leads to thought, because I have never been
farther east than Athens in my life.
What did the man mean? Can we possibly visit other cities in our sleep?
Has each of us an _alter ego_, who can really behave, elsewhere?
Whether we have or not, I know that this information about my Shanghai
double is going to be a great nuisance to me. It is going to change my
character. In fact, it has already begun to change it. Let me give you
an example.
Only yesterday I was about to be very angry with a telegraph boy who
brought back a telegram I had dispatched about two hours earlier, saying
that it could not be delivered because it was insufficiently addressed.
Obviously it was not the boy's fault, for he belonged to our country
post office, and the telegram had been sent to London and was returned
from there; and yet I started to abuse that boy as though he were not
only the Postmaster-General himself but the inventor of red-tape into
the bargain. And all for a piece of carelessness of my own.
And then suddenly I remembered Shanghai and how delightful I was there.
And I shut up instantly, and apologized, and rewrote the message, and
gave the boy a shilling for himself. If one could be delightful in
Shanghai one must be delightful at home too.
And so it is going to be. There is very little fun for me in the future,
and all because of that nice-mannered double in Shanghai whom I must not
disgrace. For it would be horrible if one day a lady told him that she
had overheard some one who had met him in London and found him to be a
bear.
=ON BELLONA'S HEM=
(SECOND SERIES)