ABSTRACT
William Henry Salter appears only once in Strachey's biography. Salter was, in reality, a student at Cambridge during Strachey's time there, earning first-class honours in Classics in 1901 and then going on to practise law. Strachey, who was a modernist 'spiritualist' of the psychological type, attributes to Salter a certain mental 'infirmity'; Strachey also thought that Salter lacked tact. It seems to have been intended not as an ideological critique but as a personal attack. This passage points to several salient points about Salter with respect to the attitude that Strachey expresses towards him in his encounter with Cleopatra in this, the most sexually suggestive of Strachey's dialogues. Beginning in the mid-1910s, Salter was an active figure in the Society for Psychical Research, and served as its president in 1947–8 – though, to judge from Strachey's letter, he was already actively thinking about spiritualist matters a decade before joining the SPR.
