"'Initiate me--oh initiate me--I beg you,' she said, and looked more beautiful than ever. Her arm trembled; her voice faltered. Even if I did not respect my oath, I should not have told her the teachings of Eleusis. They were far too simple for her mystery-craving soul. So I told her of the Orphic mysteries, and the more she heard of the extravagant and mind-shaking rites and tenets, the more interested she became. Her mouth, usually so severe, swung again in pouty lines of youthful timidity, and her voice got a 'cello down of mellowness.
"'Let us introduce Orphism into this country,' she exclaimed. 'Will you be honorary treasurer?'
"I accepted," said Alcibiades. "Within three days Orphism was presented as the _Orphic Science_. The members were called priestesses, archontes, or acolytes, according to their degree. Within a month there were 843 members. Jamblichus was sent for and made secretary. Costumes were invented; pamphlets printed; cures promised; shares offered. It was declared that trances and mystic shivers would be procured 'while you wait'; dreams accounted for; inexplicables explained; the curtain of things raised every Friday at five, after tea. Finally the Orphics gave their first dinner at the Hotel Cecil.
"That was the worst blow. After that I abandoned Orphism."
Hestia now interrupted Alcibiades with the question whether all the women in nebulous Britannia were as grotesque as those that he had described.
"Not all of them, but all at times. Women must necessarily adapt themselves to the nature of their men, as clerks do to that of their patrons, or soldiers to that of their generals and officers. The Englishman buys his liberty at the expense of much human capital; which cannot but make him eccentric and grotesque. The women attune themselves to him, although no foreigner has a clearer nor a more depreciative idea of Englishmen's angularity than have English women. As women they do not, as a rule, care for liberty at all, and hence consider the sacrifices made by men for liberty as superfluous and uncalled-for. A woman wants in all things the human note, which the average Englishman hates. Hence the surprising power of Continental men over English women. A hundred picked Greeks from Athens, Sicyon and Syracuse could bring half of all English women to book--for Cytherea. How could it be otherwise? The animated, passionate, direct talk of a Greek is something so novel to an English woman that she is as it were hypnotised by it. She thinks it is she and her personality that has given her Continental admirer that _verve_ of expression which she has never before experienced in the men of her circle. This alone is such flattery to her that she loses her head.