And then there were the sheer follies that were devised from time to time by adventurous hostesses; a sad witness to the jaded palate that demanded them. There was Angela Nuneaton’s midnight picnic in Hyde Park: all the guests had to climb over the railings, and there were a good many accidents: Archie Lock looked round him and said that dresses were being torn very low this season. It was only the bursting of a champagne cork that attracted the attention of the police; and even so very few of us were caught. Then there was a rather macabre breakfast party, organized by Trevor Hodgkins, who was something or other at the Zoo; we had it in the hyena run on the Mappin terraces, to the intense interest of the regular inhabitants. I didn’t care for it much; laughter at breakfast always seems to me out of place. I think the jolliest parties we had were the more ordinary picnics on Hampstead Heath: my mother always imagined that these must be desperately vulgar, because in her younger days Hampstead Heath used to be the playground of the democracy! It was Sybil Linklater, I think, who started the idea of revolving ball-rooms, which caught on so about this time; I never could see much fun in it myself. There used to be a story of Sir A. F. (I will not give his full name), who was all too much addicted to the liquid pleasures of the table: it was said that he set out one night after dinner for Sybil’s, and by mistake got into the next house, where there was also a dance on; he proceeded to dance there the whole evening without discovering that the floor was not revolving!
But I suppose if there is one thing more foolish than the deliberate follies of Society, it is the way people take up strange hobbies of the intellectual kind—movements, crazes, philosophies. Not that so much intellect is wasted on these as used to be wasted on cards when they used to play games of skill: I remember, for example, the Petheringtons, who were very old-fashioned, used still to play “bridge”: and by that time they could calculate so exactly what was bound to happen in each game that they always threw down their hands after the second round. But it is the clever people, and the clever women especially, in Society who seem to become the prey of all the most outrageous impostors. There were still Spiritualists in those days, and if all they said was true they had got far beyond the stage of merely evoking the spirits of the dead: they held commerce, in a quite matter-of-fact way, with the souls of people yet unborn, who appeared to have an exact knowledge of what was going to happen to them when they came to earth. I attended a séance once at which we had a most fascinating interview with a future Emperor of Transylvania, who proved at the end of the evening to be under the impression that it was somewhere in China. The Spiritualists also discovered a special kind of control in the fifth degree (at that time you always had a series of seven “controls” between you and the person you were speaking to), which they called _pani’s_; these were said to read the future like a book. But when they got the Derby winner wrong three years running, the last time with a horse which was not even entered, their public credit was somewhat blown upon. People used to be very superstitious, too, in those days: I remember, for example, that Louise Merewether would never take her helico out if she had seen a lame man that morning; and a friend of hers, whose name I forget, told me that she never went to church, but she always kissed her hand if she met a clergyman, because it brought her good luck at oogle.