Three Men and a Maid

MP3 Audio CD. Three Men and a Maid

CHAPTER ONE


Through the curtained windows of the furnished apartment which Mrs.
Horace Hignett had rented for her stay in New York rays of golden
sunlight peeped in like the foremost spies of some advancing army. It
was a fine summer morning. The hands of the Dutch clock in the hall
pointed to thirteen minutes past nine; those of the ormolu clock in the
sitting-room to eleven minutes past ten; those of the carriage clock on
the bookshelf to fourteen minutes to six. In other words, it was
exactly eight; and Mrs. Hignett acknowledged the fact by moving her
head on the pillow, opening her eyes, and sitting up in bed. She always
woke at eight precisely.

Was this Mrs. Hignett _the_ Mrs. Hignett, the world-famous writer
on Theosophy, the author of "The Spreading Light," "What of the
Morrow," and all the rest of that well-known series? I'm glad you asked
me. Yes, she was. She had come over to America on a lecturing tour.

The year 1921, it will be remembered, was a trying one for the
inhabitants of the United States. Every boat that arrived from England
brought a fresh swarm of British lecturers to the country. Novelists,
poets, scientists, philosophers, and plain, ordinary bores; some herd
instinct seemed to affect them all simultaneously. It was like one of
those great race movements of the Middle Ages. Men and women of widely
differing views on religion, art, politics, and almost every other
subject; on this one point the intellectuals of Great Britain were
single-minded, that there was easy money to be picked up on the lecture
platforms of America and that they might just as well grab it as the
next person.