He had been quite as noisy and threatening as the average evangelist; to reasonably large gatherings he had stated that the Judgment Day was rather more than likely to occur before six a. m., and he had told all the chronic anecdotes of the dying drunkard. But there was something wrong. He could not make it go.
Sharon was with him, beckoning him, intolerably summoning him, intolerably rebuking him. Sometimes he worshiped her as the shadow of a dead god; always he was humanly lonely for her and her tantrums and her electric wrath and her abounding laughter. In pulpits he felt like an impostor, and in hotel bedrooms he ached for her voice.
Worst of all, he was expected everywhere to tell of her "brave death in the cause of the Lord." He was very sick about it.
Mrs. Evans Riddle invited him to join her.
Elmer had no objection to the malted milk of New Thought. But after Sharon, Mrs. Riddle was too much. She shaved regularly, she smelled of cigar smoke, yet she had a nickering fancy for warm masculine attentions.
Elmer had to earn a living, and he had taken too much of the drug of oratory to be able to go back to the road as a traveling-salesman. He shrugged when he had interviewed Mrs. Riddle; he told her that she would be an inspiration to a young man like himself; he held her hand; he went out and washed his hand; and determined that since he was to dwell in the large brownstone house which was both her Thought-power Headquarters and her home, he would keep his door locked.
The preparation for his labors was not too fatiguing. He read through six copies of Mrs. Riddle's magazine and, just as he had learned the trade-terms of evangelism, so he learned the technologies of New Thought: the Cosmic Law of Vibration; I Affirm the Living Thought. He labored through a chapter of "The Essence of Oriental Mysticism, Occultism, and Esotericism" and accomplished seven pages of the "Bhagavad-Gita"; and thus was prepared to teach disciples how to win love and prosperity.
In actual practise he had much less of treading the Himalayan heights than of pleasing Mrs. Evans Riddle. Once she discovered that he had small fancy for sitting up after
