“Oh, punk!
New Thought! Hashed thought with a poached egg!
‘Cultivating the—’ It sounds like
‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’
That’s a fine spiel for a good Presbyterian to be going to, when you can hear Doc Drew!”
“Reverend Drew is a scholar and a pulpit orator and all that, but he hasn’t got the Inner Ferment, as Mrs. Mudge calls it; he hasn’t any inspiration for the New Era.
Women need inspiration now.
So I want you to come, as you promised.” IV
The Zenith branch of the League of the Higher Illumination met in the smaller ballroom at the Hotel Thornleigh, a refined apartment with pale green walls and plaster wreaths of roses, refined parquet flooring, and ultra-refined frail gilt chairs.
Here were gathered sixty-five women and ten men.
Most of the men slouched in their chairs and wriggled, while their wives sat rigidly at attention, but two of them—red-necked, meaty men—were as respectably devout as their wives.
They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy.
It had been a toss-up with them whether to buy New Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of Episcopalianism.
In the flesh, Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge fell somewhat short of a prophetic aspect.
She was pony-built and plump, with the face of a haughty Pekingese, a button of a nose, and arms so short that, despite her most indignant endeavors, she could not clasp her hands in front of her as she sat on the platform waiting.
Her frock of taffeta and green velvet, with three strings of glass beads, and large folding eye-glasses dangling from a black ribbon, was a triumph of refinement.
Mrs. Mudge was introduced by the president of the League of the Higher Illumination, an oldish young woman with a yearning voice, white spats, and a mustache.
She said that Mrs. Mudge would now make it plain to the simplest intellect how the Sun Spirit could be cultivated, and they who had been thinking about cultivating one would do well to treasure Mrs. Mudge’s words, because even Zenith (and everybody knew that Zenith stood in the van of spiritual and New Thought progress) didn’t often have the opportunity to sit at the feet of such an inspiring Optimist and Metaphysical Seer as Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, who had lived the Life of Wider Usefulness through Concentration, and in the Silence found those Secrets of Mental Control and the Inner Key which were immediately going to transform and bring Peace, Power, and Prosperity to the unhappy nations; and so, friends, would they for this precious gem-studded hour forget the Illusions of the Seeming Real, and in the actualization of the deep-lying Veritas pass, along with Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, to the Realm Beautiful.
If Mrs. Mudge was rather pudgier than one would like one’s swamis, yogis, seers, and initiates, yet her voice had the real professional note.
It was refined and optimistic; it was overpoweringly calm; it flowed on relentlessly, without one comma, till Babbitt was hypnotized.
Her favorite word was “always,” which she pronounced olllllle-ways.
Her principal gesture was a pontifical but thoroughly ladylike blessing with two stubby fingers.
She explained about this matter of Spiritual Saturation:
“There are those—”
Of “those” she made a linked sweetness long drawn out; a far-off delicate call in a twilight minor.
It chastely rebuked the restless husbands, yet brought them a message of healing.
“There are those who have seen the rim and outer seeming of the Logos there are those who have glimpsed and in enthusiasm possessed themselves of some segment and portion of the Logos there are those who thus flicked but not penetrated and radioactivated by the Dynamis go always to and fro assertative that they possess and are possessed of the Logos and the Metaphysikos but this word I bring you this concept I enlarge that those that are not utter are not even inceptive and that holiness is in its definitive essence always always always whole-iness and—”
It proved that the Essence of the Sun Spirit was Truth, but its Aura and Effluxion were Cheerfulness:
“Face always the day with the dawn-laugh with the enthusiasm of the initiate who perceives that all works together in the revolutions of the Wheel and who answers the strictures of the Soured Souls of the Destructionists with a Glad Affirmation—”
It went on for about an hour and seven minutes.
At the end Mrs. Mudge spoke with more vigor and punctuation:
“Now let me suggest to all of you the advantages of the Theosophical and Pantheistic Oriental Reading Circle, which I represent.
Our object is to unite all the manifestations of the New Era into one cohesive whole—New Thought, Christian Science, Theosophy, Vedanta, Bahaism, and the other sparks from the one New Light.
The subscription is but ten dollars a year, and for this mere pittance the members receive not only the monthly magazine, Pearls of Healing, but the privilege of sending right to the president, our revered Mother Dobbs, any questions regarding spiritual progress, matrimonial problems, health and well-being questions, financial difficulties, and—”
They listened to her with adoring attention.
They looked genteel.
They looked ironed-out.
They coughed politely, and crossed their legs with quietness, and in expensive linen handkerchiefs they blew their noses with a delicacy altogether optimistic and refined.
As for Babbitt, he sat and suffered.
When they were blessedly out in the air again, when they drove home through a wind smelling of snow and honest sun, he dared not speak.
They had been too near to quarreling, these days.
Mrs. Babbitt forced it:
“Did you enjoy Mrs. Mudge’s talk?”
“Well I—What did you get out of it?”
“Oh, it starts a person thinking.
It gets you out of a routine of ordinary thoughts.”
“Well, I’ll hand it to Opal she isn’t ordinary, but gosh—Honest, did that stuff mean anything to you?”
“Of course I’m not trained in metaphysics, and there was lots I couldn’t quite grasp, but I did feel it was inspiring.
And she speaks so readily.
I do think you ought to have got something out of it.”