Madame Blavatsky, purple-lilac (I thought her colour that of a certain type of stout female foreigner, red and white blended into violet, but as her most vivid chronicler insists on her livid earth-grey skin, it must have been the purple-lilac of wrath) sat on the great sofa in the great drawing room in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. Her unwieldy girth obscured her colossal height. She wore a black sacque, not her familiar red flannel wrapper. She smoked. Her small boneless hands, her many rings, her pale turquoise eyes—how they have been described, how they have cheated, flashed, deceived. I would call her the Therese Humbert of Theosophy if Theosophy contained as much as the empty safe of Madame Humbert. She was attacking Frederick Myers, the Zelator of the Phantasms of the living, as I came in : no doubt the S. P. R.’s adverse report, though not yet published, was known to her. She was afraid and indignant. Her hostess, who had patted and fed so many lions, so many lambs, in Paris and in London, who had figured so romantically in Flaubert’s life, so unforgettably in Merimee’s reminiscences, could not shield her son-in-law from the outraged Priestess of Isis. She could not, as once in the Place Vendome, decapitate all Oscar Wilde’s stories with hospitable interruptions : Encore un biscuit, chere Princesse! Encore un verre d’orgeat, chere Princesse! Madame Blavatsky was no mere Danubian (no Nubian even like Anatole France’s minuscule adorer), and she cried out: ‘Mr. Myers, if you had not made me so angry I would cause all the bells in this house to ring’ (we all held our breaths —would she relent?), ‘but I will not do so.’