porcelain dish am one with Christopher Columbus, Lord Chesterfield,
Chang the Chinese Giant, the Editor of the _Atlantic_, and the humblest
illiterate who never heard of him--of which we are not so vividly
conscious. Yet we seek them instinctively, each in his own manner and
degree--amusement, useful experience, friends, and his own soul. So I
read and accept Tagore when he says, 'Man's history is the history of
man's journey to the unknown in quest of his immortal self--his soul.'
Willy-nilly, even higglety-pigglety and helter-skelter, these are what
the featherless biped is after.

As for useful experience, this afternoon tea reminds me of those lower
social gatherings where liquor is, or used to be, sold only to be drunk
on the premises. Granting that I become a finished tea-goer, easy of
speech, nodding, laughing, secure in the graceful manipulation of my
tea-things, never upsetting my tea, never putting my sandwich in the way
of an articulating tongue, yet is all this experience of no use whatever
to me except at other afternoon teas. I go to school simply to learn how
to go to school. The most finished and complete tea-goer, if he behaves
anywhere else as he does at an afternoon tea, creates more widely the
same unfavorable impression that he creates, in his own proper sphere,
on me. Can I then reasonably regard experience as useful which I observe
to be useful only for doing something which I observe to be useless? The
soap agrees that I cannot. Yet, says the sponge, _if_ I might hope at
some afternoon tea to discover my immortal soul, the case would be
different; this experience would be valuable. O foolish sponge! I am
compelled to tell you that at afternoon teas it is especially difficult
for a mortal gentleman to believe that he has any immortal soul to look
for. It is a gathering essentially mundane and ephemeral. For it we put
on our most worldly garments. For it we practise our most worldly smirks
in dumb rehearsal before our mirror and an audience of one silly,
attentive image, thinking that this time, this time--But it is always
the same: the observant mind in the immovable body. As for the immortal
soul, O sponge! it may, and doubtless does, go to strange places--but it
_cannot be dragged_.

And so we come to the final question: is the afternoon tea a place where
one featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus _Homo_ may meet
another whom he might hope some time to call a friend? I do not mean '