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+Project Gutenberg's Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers
+#4 in our series by Don Marquis
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+Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers
+
+by Don Marquis
+
+January, 1997  [Etext #776]
+
+
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+
+HERMIONE AND HER LITTLE GROUP OF SERIOUS THINKERS
+
+BY DON MARQUIS
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROEM   Introducing Some of Hermione's Friends
+
+Sincerity in the Home
+
+Vibrations
+
+Aren't the Russians Wonderful?
+
+How Suffering Purifies One!
+
+Understanding and One's Own Home
+
+Thoughts of Heredity and Things
+
+The Swami Brandranath
+
+Fothergil Finch, the Poet of Revolt
+
+How the Swami Happened to Have Seven Wives
+
+The Romantic Old Days
+
+Hermione's Boswell Explains
+
+Symbols and Dew-Hopping
+
+The Song of the Snore
+
+Ballads of Understanding
+
+Hermione on Fashions and War
+
+Urges and Dogs
+
+Moods and Poppies
+
+Concentration
+
+Soul Mates
+
+Hermione Takes up Literature
+
+The World Is Getting Better
+
+War and Art
+
+A Spiritual Dialogue
+
+Will the Best People Receive the Superman Socially?
+
+The Parasite Woman Must Go!
+
+The House Beautiful
+
+Mamma Is So Mid-Victorian
+
+Voke Easely and His New Art
+
+Hermione on Superficiality
+
+Isis, the Astrologist
+
+The Simple Home Festivals
+
+Citronella and Stegomyia
+
+Hermione's Salon Opens (Verse)
+
+The Perfume Factory
+
+On Being Other-Worldly
+
+Parents, and Their Influence
+
+Fothergil Finch Tell of His Revolt Against Organized Society
+
+The Exotic and the Unemployed
+
+Souls and Toes
+
+Kultur and Things
+
+The Spirit of Christmas
+
+Poor Dear Mamma and Fothergil Finch
+
+Prison Reform and Poise
+
+An Example of Psychic Power
+
+Some Beautiful Thoughts
+
+The Bourgeois Element and Background
+
+Taking Up the Liquor Problem
+
+The Japanese are Wonderful, If You Get What I Mean
+
+She Refuses to Give UP the Cosmos
+
+The Cave Man
+
+The Little Group Gives a Pagan Masque
+
+Sympathy
+
+Blouses, Bulgars, and Buttermilk
+
+Twilight Sleep
+
+Intuition
+
+Stimulating Influences
+
+Politics
+
+Hermione on Psychical Research
+
+Envoy   Hermione the Deathless
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE
+
+
+PROEM
+
+
+(Introducing some of Hermione's Friends)
+
+
+
+I visited one night, of late,
+Thoughts Underworld, the Brainstorm Slum,
+The land of Futile Piffledom;
+A salon weird where congregate
+Freak, Nut and Bug and Psychic Bum.
+
+There, there, they sit and cerebrate:
+The fervid Pote who never potes,
+Great Artists, Male or She, that Talk
+But scorn the Pigment and the chalk,
+And Cubist sculptors wild as Goats,
+Theosophists and Swamis, too,
+Musicians mad as Hatters be--
+(E'en puzzled Hatters, two or three!)
+Tame anarchists, a dreary crew,
+Squib Socialists too damp to sosh,
+Fake Hobohemians steeped in suds,
+Glib females in Artistic Duds
+With Captive Husbands cowed and gauche.
+
+I saw some Soul Mates side by side
+Who said their cute young Souls were pink;
+I saw a Genius on the Brink
+(Or so he said) of suicide.
+I saw a Playwright who had tried
+But couldn't make the Public think;
+I saw a novelist who cried,
+Reading his own Stuff, in his drink;
+I saw a vapid egg-eyed Gink
+Who said eight times: "Art is my bride!"
+
+A queen in sandals slammed the Pans
+And screamed a Chinese chant at us,
+the while a Hippopotamus
+Shook tables, book-shelves and divans
+With vast Terpsichorean fuss . . .
+Some Oriental kind of muss . . . .
+
+A rat-faced Idiot Boy who slimes
+White paper o'er with metric crimes--
+He is a kind of Burbling Blear
+Who warbles Sex Slush sad to hear
+And mocks God in his stolen rhymes
+and wears a ruby in one ear--
+Murder to me: "My Golden Soul
+Drinks Song from out a Crystal Bowl. . . .
+Drinks Love and Song . . . my Golden Soul!"
+I let him live.  There were no bricks.
+
+Or even now that Golden Soul
+were treading water in the Styx.
+
+A Pallid Skirt -- Anemic Wisp,
+As bloodless as a stick of chalk --
+Got busy with this line of talk:
+"The Sinner is Misunderstood!
+How can the Spirit enter in,
+Be blended with, the Truly Good
+Unless through Sympathy with Sin?"
+
+"Phryne," I murmured, sad and low,
+"I pass the Buck--I do not know!"
+
+Upon a mantel sat a Bust. . . .
+Some Hindu god, pug-faced and squat;
+A visage to inspire disgust. . . .
+Lord Bilk, the Deity of Rot. . . .
+Nay, surely, 'twas the great god Bunk,
+For when I wunk at it, it wunk!
+
+I heard . . . I heard it proved that night
+That Fire is Cold, and Black is White,
+That Junk is Art, and Art is Junk,
+That Virtue's wrong, and Vice is right,
+That Death is Life, and Life is Death,
+That Breath is Rocks, and Rocks are Breath:--
+
+The Cheap and easy paradox
+The Food springs, hoping that it shocks. . . .
+
+Brain-sick I stumbled to the street
+And drooled onto a kindly Cop:
+"Since moons have feathers on their feet,
+Why is your headgear perched on top?
+And if you scorn the Commonplace,
+Why wear a Nose upon your Face?
+And since Pythagoras is mute
+on Sex Hygiene and Cosmic Law,
+Is your Blonde Beast as Bland a Brute,
+As Blind a Brute, as Bernard Shaw?
+No doubt, when drilling through the parks,
+With Ibsen's Ghost and Old Doc Marx,
+You've often seen two Golden Souls
+Drink Suds and Sobs from Crystal Bowls?"
+
+"I ain't," he says, "I ain't, Old Kid,
+And I would pinch 'em if I did!"
+
+"Thank God," I said, "for this, at least:
+The world, in spots, is well policed!"
+
+
+
+
+
+SINCERITY IN THE HOME
+
+SINCERITY should be the keynote of a life,
+don't you think?
+
+Sincerity -- beauty -- use -- these are my
+watchwords.
+
+I heard such an interesting talk on sincerity the
+other evening.  I belong to a Little Group of Serious
+Thinkers who are taking up sincerity in all its
+phases this week.
+
+We discussed Sincerity in the Home.
+
+So many people's homes, you know, do not
+represent anything personal.
+
+The SINCERE home should be full of purpose and
+personality -- decorations, rugs, ornaments, hangings
+and all, you know.
+
+The home shows the soul.
+
+So I'm doing over our house from top to bottom,
+putting personality into it.
+
+I've a room I call the Ancestor's Room.
+
+You know, when one has ancestors, one's ancestral
+traditions keep one up to the mark, somehow.
+You know what I mean -- blood will tell, and all that.
+Ancestors help one to be sincere.
+
+So I've finished my Ancestors' Room with all
+sorts of things to remind me of the dear dead-and-gone
+people I get my traditions from.
+
+Heirlooms and portraits and things, you know.
+
+Of course, all our own family heirlooms were
+destroyed in a fire years ago.
+
+So I had to go to the antique shops for the portraits
+and furniture and chairs and snuff boxes and
+swords and fire irons and things.
+
+I bought the loveliest old spinet -- truly, a fine!
+
+I can sit down to it and image I am my own
+grandmother's grandmother, you know.
+
+And it's wonderful to sit among those old heir-
+looms and feel the sense of my ancestors'
+personalities throbbing and pulsing all about me!
+
+I feel, when I sit at the spinet, that my personality
+is truly represented by my surroundings at last.
+
+I feel that I have at last achieved sincerity in the
+midst of my traditions.
+
+And there's a picture of the loveliest old lady . . .
+old fashioned costume, you know, and all that . . .
+and the hair dressed in a very peculiar way. . . .
+
+Mamma says its a MADE-UP picture -- not really
+an antique at all -- but I can just feel the personality
+vibrating from it.
+
+I got it at a bargain, too.
+
+I call her -- the picture, you know -- after an
+ancestress of mine who came to this country in the
+old Colonial days.
+
+With William the Conqueror, you know -- or
+maybe it was William Penn.  But it couldn't have
+been William Penn, could it?  For she went to New
+Jersey -- Orange, N.J.  Was it William of Orange?
+More than likely . . .
+
+Anyhow, I call the picture after her -- Lady Clarissa,
+I call it.  She married a commoner, as so
+many of the early settlers of this country did.
+
+When I sit at the spinet and look at Lady Clarissa
+I often wonder what people do without family
+traditions.
+
+And its such a comfort to know I'm in a room
+that really represents my personality.
+
+
+
+
+VIBRATIONS
+
+Have you thought much about Vibrations?
+
+We're taking them up this week -- a Little
+Group of Advanced Thinkers I belong
+to, you know -- and they're wonderfully worth
+while -- WONDERFULLY so!
+
+That's what I always ask myself -- is a thing
+WORTH WHILE?  Or isn't it?
+
+Vibrations are the key to everything.  Atoms
+used to be, but Atoms have quite gone out.
+
+The thing that makes the new dances so wonder-
+fully beneficial, you know, is that they give you
+Vibrations.
+
+To an untrained mind, of course, Vibrations
+would be dangerous.
+
+But I always feel that the right sort of mind will
+get good out of everything, and the wrong sort will
+get harm.
+
+The most interesting woman talked to us the
+other night -- to our little group, you know -- on one-
+piece bathing suits and the Greek spirit.
+
+Don't you just done on the Greeks?
+
+They have some of the most MODERN ideas -- it
+seems we get a lot of our advanced thought from
+them, if you get what I mean.
+
+They were so UNRESTRICTED, too.  One has only
+to look at their friezes and vases and things to
+realize that.
+
+And the one-piece bathing suit, so the woman
+said, was an unconscious modern effort to get back
+to the Greek spirit.
+
+She had a husband with her.  He does lecture
+or anything, you know.
+
+But she isn't so very Greek-looking herself, al-
+though her spirit is so Greek, so she has this Greek-
+looking husband to wear the sandals and the tunics
+and the togas and things.
+
+She calls him Achilles.
+
+It's quite proper, you know -- Achilles stays be-
+hind a screen until she wants to illustrate a
+point, and then he comes out with a lyre or a lute
+or something, and just stands there and LOOKS Greek.  And
+then he goes back behind the screen and changes
+into the next garment she needs.
+
+Of course, there are lots of men couldn't stand
+it as well as Achilles.  But when you come to that,
+there are lots of men who don't look so very well
+in bathing suits, either.
+
+And, of course, our American men don't have
+the temperament to carry off a thing like that.
+
+Of course, if we all turned Greek it would be
+quite a shock at first to see everybody come
+into a dining-room or a drawing-room looking like
+Achilles does.
+
+Not that temperament makes so much difference
+as it did a few years ago, you know -- temperament
+and personality are going out and individuality is
+coming in.
+
+Have you thought much about automatic writing?
+
+It's being taken up again, you know.
+
+Not the vulgar, old-fashioned kind of
+spiritualism -- that was so ordinary, wasn't it?
+
+The new ghosts are different.  More -- more --
+well, more REFINED, somehow, you know.  Like the
+new dances as compared with that horrid turkey trot.
+
+One should always ask one's self:  "Does this
+have a refining influence on me; and through me on
+the world?"
+
+For, after all, there is a duty one owes to society
+in general.
+
+Have you seen the new sunshades?
+
+
+
+
+
+AREN'T THE RUSSIANS WONDERFUL?
+
+Aren't the Russians marvelous people!
+
+We're been taking up Diaghileff in a serious
+way -- our little group, you know -- and
+really, he's wonderful!
+
+Who else but Diaghileff could give those lovely
+Russians things the proper accent?
+
+And accent -- if you know what I mean -- accent
+is everything!
+
+Accent! Accent! What would art be without
+accent?
+
+Accent is coming in -- if you get what I mean --
+and what they call "punch" is going out.  I always
+thought it was a frightfully vulgar sort of thing,
+anyhow -- punch!
+
+The thing I love about the Russians is their
+Orientalism.
+
+You know there's an old saying that if you find
+a Russian you catch a Tartar . . . or something
+like that.
+
+I'm sure that is wrong. . . . I get so MIXED on
+quotations.  But I always know where I can find
+them, if you know what I mean.
+
+But the Russian verve isn't Oriental, is it?
+
+Don't you just dote on verve?
+
+That's what makes Bakst so fascinating, don't
+you think? -- his verve
+
+Though they do say that the Russian operas
+don't analyze as well as the German or Italian
+ones -- if you get what I mean.
+
+Though for that matter, who analyzes them?
+
+One may not know how to analyze an operate, and
+yet one may know what one likes!
+
+I suppose there will be a frightful lot of imitations
+of Russian music and ballet now.  Don't you
+just hate imitators?
+
+One finds it everywhere -- imitation!  It's the sincerest
+flattery, they say. But that doesn't excuse it,
+do you think?
+
+There's a girl -- one of my friends, she says she
+is -- who is trying to imitate me.  My expressions,
+you know, and the way I walk and talk,
+and all that sort of thing.
+
+She gets some of my superficial mannerisms . . .
+but she can't quite do my things as if they were her
+own, you know . . . there is where the accent
+comes in again!
+
+
+
+
+HOW SUFFERING PURIFIES ONE!
+
+Oh, to go through fire and come out purified!
+Suffering is wonderful, isn't it?  Simply WONDERFUL!
+
+The loveliest man talked to us the other night --
+to our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know
+-- about social ideals and suffering.
+
+The reason so many attempts to improve things
+fail, you know, is because the people who try them
+out haven't suffered personally.
+
+He had the loveliest eyes, this man.
+
+He made me thin.  I said to myself, "After all,
+have I suffered? Have I been purified by fire?"
+
+And I decided that I had -- that is spiritually,
+you know.
+
+The suffering -- the spiritual suffering -- that I
+undergo through being misunderstood is something FRIGHTFUL!
+
+Mamma discourages every Cause I take up.  So does Papa.
+
+I get no sympathy in my devotion to my ideals.
+Only opposition!
+
+And from a child I have had such a high-strung,
+sensitive nervous organization that opposition of
+any sort has made me ill.
+
+There are some temperaments like that.
+
+Once when I was quite small and Mamma
+threatened to spank me, I had convulsions.
+
+And nothing but opposition, opposition,
+opposition now!
+
+Only we advanced thinkers know what it is to
+suffer!  To go through fire for our ideals!
+
+And what is physical suffering by the side of
+spiritual suffering?
+
+I so often think of that when I am engaged in
+sociological work.  Only the other night -- it was
+raining and chilly, you know -- some of us went
+down in the auto to one of the missions and looked
+at the sufferers who were being cared for.
+
+And the thought came to me all of a sudden:
+"Yes, physical suffering may be relieved -- but what
+is there to relieve spiritual suffering like mine?"
+
+Though, of course, it improves one.
+
+I think it is beginning to show in my eyes.
+
+I looked at them for nearly two hours in the
+mirror last evening, trying to be quite certain.
+
+And, you know, there's a kind of look in them
+that's never been there until recently.  A kind of
+a -- a ----
+
+Well, it's an INTANGIBLE look, if you get what I mean.
+
+Not exactly the HUNGRY look, more of a YEARNING look!
+
+Thank heaven, though, I can control it -- one
+should always be captain of one's soul, shouldn't
+one?
+
+I hide it at times.  Because one must hide one's
+suffering from the world, mustn't one?
+
+But at other times I let it show.
+
+And, really, with practice, I think I am going
+to manage it so that I can turn it off and on -- if
+you get what I mean -- almost at will.
+
+Because, you know, in certain costumes that look
+will be QUITE unbecoming.
+
+Quite out of Harmony.  And Inner Beauty only
+comes through Inner Harmony, doesn't it?
+
+Harmony!  Harmony!  Oh, to be in accord with
+the Infinite!
+
+Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself,
+"have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today,
+or have I failed?"
+
+
+
+
+UNDERSTANDING, AND ONE'S OWN HOME
+
+It's TERRIBLE when one can't get understanding
+in one's own family!
+
+Papa has very little real sympathy for my
+advanced ideas.  And as for Mamma!
+
+Sometimes I think I shall WRITE!
+
+Express myself, my real Ego, in Song.
+
+Not rhymes, of course.  If I worked a year I
+couldn't make two lines rhyme.
+
+But rhyme is going out, anyhow.
+
+Vers Libre is all the rage now.
+
+We took it up not long ago -- our Little Group
+of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and I feel
+confident it is My Medium of Expression.
+
+It is so untrammeled, isn't it?
+
+And one should be untrammeled, both in Art and
+Life, shouldn't one?
+
+Often I ask myself, at the close of day:  "Have I
+been untrammeled today?  Or have I FAILED?
+
+If I could put my real Ego -- and how wonderful
+the Ego is, isn't it? -- into vers libre, even Papa
+might understand me.
+
+I have always yearned to be understood!
+
+I have drawn back from matrimony again and
+again because I thought:  "Will he understand me?
+Will he see my real Ego?  Or will he not?"
+
+Only the other evening I was talking to the loveliest
+man, who has been misunderstood by his wife.
+It is FRIGHTFUL!
+
+He is a sculptor.  A cubist sculptor.  But he
+looks quite respectable -- really, some very good
+people receive him.
+
+And he has the most wonderful eyes -- sympathetic,
+you know, and psychic -- but oh! so pure, too!
+
+He dotes on purity.  He told me that.
+
+His wife does not understand him.  She does
+not see his real Ego.
+
+He said to me:  "I can read you like an open
+book.  You are yearning.  You are yearning for
+real understanding.  No one has EVER understood you.
+Is that not so?  Is that not your secret?
+
+Alas!  It was.  I could not deny it.
+
+I said to him:  "But is real understanding EVER attainable?"
+
+He sighed and said:  "Alas!  The Unattainable!"
+
+I knew why he sighed--there is so much of it --
+the Unattainable!
+
+"What one attains," I said, "is often so intangible --
+do you not find it so?"
+
+"Alas!" he said, "the Intangible!"
+
+And I felt, somehow -- in a queer psychic way
+that is elusive, you know -- strengthened and
+sweetened spiritually by our sad little talk.
+
+Our real Egos had been in communion.  That's
+what he said.
+
+He has nine very commonplace children, and his
+wife is very difficult socially.
+
+She insists on filling some sort of commercial
+position, although he says her place is in the home.
+
+So they have grown apart.  People don't invite
+her places.  Only him.
+
+Oh!  to be understood!
+
+
+
+
+THOUGHTS ON HEREDITY AND THINGS
+
+Isn't Heredity wonderful, though!
+
+We've been going into it rather deeply --
+My little Group of Serious, you know.
+
+And, really, when you get into it, it's quite complicated.
+All about Homozygotes and Heterozygotes, you know.
+
+The Homozygotes are -- well, you might call
+them the aristocrats, you know; thoroughbreds.
+
+And the Heterozygotes are the hybrids.
+
+Only, of course, they don't need to be goats at
+all.
+
+Not but what they COULD be goats, you know, just
+as easily as horses or cows or human beings.
+
+But whether goats or humans, don't you think
+the great lesson of Heredity is that Blood will Tell?
+
+Really the farther I go into Philosophy and
+Science and such things the more clearly I see what a
+fund of truth there is in the old simple proverbs!
+
+People used to find out great truths by Instinct,
+you know; and now they use Research -- vaccinate
+guinea pigs, you know, and all that sort of thing.
+
+Instinct!  Isn't Instinct wonderful!
+
+And Intuition, too!
+
+You know, I have the most remarkable intuition
+at times!  Have I ever told you that I'm fright-
+fully psychic?
+
+Mr. Finch, the poet -- you know Fothergil Finch,
+don't you? -- he writes vers libre and poetry both
+-- Mr. Finch said to me the other evening, "You
+are EXTREMELY psychic!"
+
+"How did you know it?" I asked him.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "how DOES one know these things?"
+
+And how true that is, when you come to think
+it over!  How DOES one know?
+
+He has the great magnetic eyes!  I could feel
+them drawing my thoughts from me as we talked.
+
+"You have a secret," he said.
+
+"Yes," I said.  And to myself I added, "Alas!"
+
+"Your secret is," he said, "that there is a
+difference between you and the other girls."
+
+It was positively uncanny!  I'VE felt that for
+years!  But no one else had ever suspected it before.
+
+"Mr. Finch," I said, "I must have TOLD you that --
+or else it was just a wild guess.  You COULDN'T have
+gotten it psychically.  HOW did you know it?"
+
+"One knows these things," he said -- a trifle sadly,
+I thought.  "They come to one -- out of the
+
+Silences; one knows not how.  It is better not to
+ask how!  It is better not to question!  It is better
+to accept!  Do you not feel it so?
+
+Sometimes I think that Fothergil Finch is the
+only man who has ever understood me.
+
+You see, I am Dual in my personality.
+
+There is the real Ego, and there is the Alter Ego.
+
+And, besides these, I have so many moods which
+do not come from either one of my Egos!  They
+come from my Subliminal Consciousness!
+
+Isn't the Subliminal Consciousness wonderful;
+simply WONDERFUL?
+
+We're going to take it up in a serious way some
+evening next week, and thresh it out thoroughly.
+
+But I must run along.  I have an engagement
+with my dressmaker at two o'clock.  You know,
+I've really found one who can make my gowns
+interpret my inner spirit.
+
+
+
+
+THE SWAMI BRANDRANATH
+
+I HEARD such a lovely lecture the other night
+on the Cosmos.
+
+A Little Group of Advanced Women that I
+belong to are specializing this winter on the Cosmos.
+
+We took it up, you know, because the other topics
+we were studying included it so frequently.  And
+it's wonderful, really WONDERFUL!
+
+Of course, an untrained mind will grapple with
+it in vain.  One's interest must be serious and sincere.
+One must devote time to it.,
+
+Otherwise one will get more harm than good
+out of it, you know.
+
+It's like the Russian dances that way.
+
+They are so primal, those dances!  And all those
+primal things are dangerous, don't you think?
+Unless one has poise!
+
+It's odd, too, that some of the most primal
+people have the most poise, isn't it?
+
+The Swami Brandranath was like that.  I've told
+you bout the Swami Brandramath, haven't I?
+
+He wore such lovely robes!  You can't buy silk
+like that in this country.
+
+And he had such a PURE look in this eyes.  So
+many of these magnetic people lack that pure look,
+you know.
+
+He used to give talks to a Little Group of Serious
+Thinkers I belong to.
+
+He taught us to go into the Silences -- only we
+never quite learned, for some of the girls would
+giggle.  There are always people like that.  The
+dear Swami! -- he was so patient!  It was
+Occidental levity, he said, and we couldn't help it.
+
+That is one of the main differences between the
+Orient and the Occident, you know.
+
+How wonderful they are, the Orientals.  And
+just think of India, with all its yogis and bazaars
+and mahatmas and howdahs and rajahs and things!
+
+He was a Brahmin, the Swami was.  A Brahmin
+and a Burman are the same thing, you know.
+
+It's a caste, like belonging to one of our best
+families.
+
+The Swami explained about the marks of caste,
+and so forth, to us.
+
+And then one of the girls asked him if he was
+tattooed!
+
+The idea!
+
+
+
+
+FOTHERGIL FINCH, THE POET OF REVOLT
+
+Isn't it odd how some of the most radical and
+advanced and virile of the leaders in the New
+Art and the New Thought don't look it at all?
+
+There's Fothergil Finch, for instance.  Nobody
+could be more virile than Fothy is in his Soul.
+Fothy's Inner Ego, if you get what I mean, is a
+Giant in Revolt all the time.
+
+And yet to look at Fothy you wouldn't think he
+was a Modern Cave Man.  Not that he looks like
+a weakling, you know.  Butwell, if you get what
+I mean -- you'd think Fothy might write about
+violets instead of thunderbolts.
+
+Dear Papa is ENTIRELY mistaken about him.
+
+Only yesterday dear papa said to me, "Hermione,
+if you don't keep that damned little vers libre run
+away from here I'll put him to work, and he'll die
+of it."
+
+But you couldn't expect Papa to appreciate Fothy.
+Papa is SO reactionary and conservative.
+
+And Fothy's life is one long, grim, desperate
+struggle against Conventionality, and Social
+Injustice, and Smugness, and the Established Order, and
+Complacence.  He is forever being a martyr to the
+New and True in Art and Life.
+
+Last night he read me his latest poem -- one of his
+greatest, he says -- in which he tries to tell just what
+his Real Self is.  It goes:
+
+Look at me!
+Behold, I am founding a New Movement!
+Observe me. . . . I am in Revolt!
+I revolt!
+Now persecute me, persecute me, damn you,
+    persecute me, curse you, persecute me!
+Philistine,
+Bourgeois,
+Slave,
+Serf,
+Capitalist,
+Respectabilities that you are,
+Persecute me!
+Bah!
+You ask me, do you, what am I in revolt against?
+Against you, fool, dolt, idiot, against you, against
+    everything!
+Against Heavy, Hell and punctuation . . . against
+    Life, Death, rhyme and rhythm . . .
+Persecute me, now, persecute me, curse you,
+    persecute me!
+Slave that you are . . . what do Marriage,
+    Tooth-brushes, Nail-files, the Decalogue,
+    Handkerchiefs, Newton's Law of Gravity, Capital,
+    Barbers, Property, Publishers, Courts, Rhyming
+    Dictionaries, Clothes, Dollars, mean to Me?
+
+I am a Giant, I am a Titan, I am a Hercules of
+    Liberty, I am Prometheus, I am the Jess Willard
+    of the New Cerebral Pugilism, I am the Mod-
+    ern Cave Man, I am the Comrade of the Cosmic
+    Urge, I have kicked off the Boots of Superstition,
+    and I run wild along the Milky Way
+    without ingrowing toenails,
+I am I!
+Curse you, what are You?
+You are only You!
+Nothing more!
+Ha!
+Bah! . . . persecute me, now persecute me!
+
+Fothy always gets excited and trembles and
+chokes when he reads his own poetry, and while
+he was reading it Papa came into the room and
+disgraced himself by asking if there was
+any MONEY in that kind of poetry, and Fothy
+was so agitated that he fairly screamed when he
+said:
+
+"Money . . . money . . . curse money!  Money
+is one of the things I am in revolt against. . . .
+
+Money is death and damnation to the free spirit!"
+
+Papa said he was sorry to hear that; he said one
+of his companies needed an ad writer, and he didn't
+have any objection to hiring a free spirit with a
+punch, but he couldn't consider getting anyone to
+write ads that hated money, for there was a salary
+attached to the job.
+
+And Fothy said: "You are trying to bribe me!
+Capitalism is casting its net over me!  You are trying
+to make me a serf: trying to silence a Free
+Voice!  But I will resist!  I will not be enslaved!
+I will not write ads.  I will not have a job.
+
+And then Papa said he was glad to hear Fothy's
+sentiments.  He had been afraid, he said, that Fothy
+had matrimonial designs about me.  And the
+man who married HIS daughter would probably have
+to stand for possessing a good deal of wealth, too,
+for he had always intended doing something very
+handsome for his son-in-law.  So if Fothy didn't
+want money, he wouldn't want me, for an enormous
+amount of it would go to me.
+
+Papa, you know, thinks he can be awfully sarcastic.
+
+So many Earth Persons pride themselves on their
+sarcasm, don't you think?
+
+And Papa is an Earth Person entirely.  I've got
+his horoscope.  He isn't AT ALL spiritual.
+
+But you can image that the whole scene was
+FRIGHTFULLY embarrassing to me -- I will NEVER forgive Papa!
+
+And I haven't made up my mind AT ALL about
+Fothy.  But what I do know is this: once I get my
+mind made up, I WILL NOT stand for opposition form
+ANY source.
+
+One must be an Individualist, or perish!
+
+
+
+
+HOW THE SWAMI HAPPENED TO HAVE SEVEN WIVES
+
+Isn't it terrible about that elephant at the Zoo
+-- Oh, you know! -- it's like Gunga Din, only,
+of course, it isn't Gunga Din at all.
+
+Anyhow, he's CHAINED FOR LIFE!  I suppose some-
+one gave him tobacco for a joke and it made him
+cross.  I've heard of those cases, haven't you?
+
+An elephant is such a -- such a -- well, NOBLE beast,
+isn't he?
+
+It's transmigration of souls makes them that way,
+perhaps.
+
+Oh is it a Rajah?
+
+Anyhow, it sits on top of an elephant.
+
+We took up transmigration of souls one time --
+our little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know --
+and it's wonderful; simply WONDERFUL!
+
+That was when the Swami Brandranath used to
+talk to us.  The dear Swami!  Such eyes -- so pure
+and yet so magnetic! -- I have never seen in a human
+being.
+
+The eye is the window of the soul, you know.
+
+He's in jail now, the poor, dear Swami.  But he
+wasn't really a bigamist at all.  You see, he had
+seven spiritual planes.  All of us do, only most of
+us don't know it.  But he could get from one plane
+to another quite easily.
+
+Of course, he couldn't remember what he'd done
+on one plane while he was on the next one above
+or below it.  And that's the way he happened to
+have seven wives -- one for each spiritual plane.
+
+Only the Court took a sordid view of it.  It seems
+there was something about life insurance mixed
+up with it, too.
+
+The Occidentals are so apt to miss the spiritual
+sweetness of the Oriental, don't you think?
+
+We are -- all but the Leaders of Thought, and a
+little group, here and there -- so commonplace.
+
+Don't you LOATHE the commonplace?
+
+Not loathe, really, of course -- because the harmonious
+mind does not let itself be disturbed.
+
+The harmonious mind realizes that dirt is only
+useful matter in the wrong place, as Tennyson sings
+so sweetly somewhere.
+
+Tennyson has quite gone out, of course.  He is
+so -- so, well, if you get what I mean -- so mid-
+Victorian, somehow.
+
+It seems he WAS mid-Victorian all the time, but
+it's only recently that it's been found out on him.
+
+Though I always will think of "come Into the
+Garden, Maud," as one of the world's sweetest
+little epics.
+
+I'm very independent that way, in spite of the
+critics.  After all, criticism comes down to a question
+of individual taste, doesn't it?  That is, in the
+final analysis.
+
+Independence!  That is what this age needs.
+Nearly every night before I got to bed I say to myself:
+"Have I been independent today?  Or have I FAILED?"
+
+I believe in those little spiritual examinations,
+don't you?
+
+It helps one to keep in tune with the Infinite, you
+know.
+
+The Infinite!  How much it comprises!  And
+how little we really understand it!
+
+We're going to take it up, the Infinite, in a serious
+way soon -- our Little Group of Advanced
+Thinkers, you know.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROMANTIC OLD DAYS
+
+It must have been terribly difficult getting around
+in the days before automobiles were invented,
+or railroads or anything like that.
+
+Though, of course, it was wonderfully romantic,
+too.
+
+The old coaching days, particularly, when everybody
+blew on horns as they drove from town to
+town, and there were highwaymen and cavaliers
+with swords and all those people, you know, riding
+by the coaches.
+
+Don't you just DOTE on romance?  I do!
+
+But, of course, there's no place for it in our hurried
+modern life, and I suppose we shouldn't regret it.
+
+But now and then I sigh over it.  Like dropping
+a tear, you know, in a dear old chest perfumed with
+lavender and old roses.
+
+I always say that one can be advanced and in
+the van of modern progress, and still drop a tear,
+you know.
+
+Do you think that all this study of sex hygiene
+means the death of romance?
+
+It's a serious thought, isn't it?
+
+But what I always say is:  "Which of these
+things will do the most GOOD in the world?"
+
+Especially good to the POOR!
+
+You know how frightfully interested I am in the poor.
+
+I make that my test.  I always say to myself:
+"Which will do the most good to the great masses?"
+
+I take such a serious interest in the MASSES!
+
+We should think twice before we take romance out
+of their lives and replace it with science of any kind.
+
+For, after all, you know, they represent the Future.
+
+We should all think of the Future.
+
+That's what makes the Feminist Movement such
+a WONDERFUL thing -- it is moving right straight ahead
+toward the Future!
+
+I'm thinking of being a Suffragist again.  I was
+once, you know, but I resigned.
+
+The sashes and banners are such a frightful shade
+of yellow, you know.  So I quit.
+
+Beauty, after all, is the chief thing.  What, after
+all, do all our reforms come to, if the world is not
+to be made more beautiful because of them?
+
+And I simply CANNOT wear yellow.
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE'S BOSWELL EXPLAINS
+
+Believe me, 'tis not with elation
+  I dwell on Hermione's madness;
+The result of my rapt contemplation
+  Is sadness, a terrible sadness!
+
+I weep when I note how she drivels;
+  I sigh o'er her fake philanthropies;
+I am pained when I see how she frivols,
+  Like a kitten, with serious topics.
+
+It is grief that her mental condition
+  Inspires, not laughter or scorning;
+If she has any use, 'til her Mission
+  To stand as a Horrible Warning.
+
+I am moral, essentially moral;
+  I am grave, and hate everything trashy,
+And that is the reason I quarrel
+  With intellects flighty and flashy.
+
+I yearn for the truth, I am earnest;
+  I yearn to face facts without blinking,
+
+Of all of my years, quite the yearnest
+  Is my yearn to be thorough in thinking.
+
+That's why I'm severe with this darling,
+  Nor pardon nor whitewash nor gloss her, --
+The linnet -- the parrot -- the starling!
+  I weep over her and expose her.
+
+
+
+
+SYMBOLS AND DEW-HOPPING
+
+Last week the Loveliest man lectured to us --
+to our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
+you know -- on the Ultimate Symbolism.  In
+art and life both, you know.
+
+It was simply wonderful -- WONDERFUL!
+
+Art, you know, used to be full of symbolism.
+
+But now, it seems, symbolism has dropped out
+of Art, and Nature has taken it up.
+
+Odd, isn't it?  But really not surprising when
+you come to think about it.
+
+For, you know, Nature is always trying to keep
+up with advanced ideas -- evolving and evolving
+toward the Superman.
+
+And the Superwoman, too.
+
+I think it is the duty of us who are advanced
+thinkers to give Nature a worthy idea to evolve
+toward, don't you?
+
+To set Nature a mark to come up to, you know.
+
+For what is the use of evolution if it doesn't
+evolve forward instead of backward?
+
+And the Best People, I think, should feel a sense
+of social responsibility and give evolution a model.
+
+Each should be a Symbol -- that's what I always
+ask myself each night now:  "Have I been a Symbol
+today?  Or have I failed to be a symbol?"
+
+Down at the beach last week I nearly drowned --
+you don't mean to say you haven't heard of it?  It
+was frightful.
+
+I'd always heard that, when a person sinks, his
+whole past life passes before him in review.
+
+But it didn't with me.  What I said as I went
+down was:  "Have I been a Symbol?  Or have I
+failed?"
+
+And the life guard who got me out -- he was simply
+the most gorgeous man! -- burned bronze, you
+know, and with shoulders like a Greek god! -- and
+with the most wonderful eyes and white teeth -- he
+asked me, the guard did, "What, marm?"
+
+It was fearfully disappointing!  Sometimes they
+are college men, you know, just life-guarding
+through the summer.  But would any college man
+have said, "What, marm?"
+
+And then he went and saved a blonde creature
+in the most scandalous bathing suit I ever saw.
+
+He saved one in the most business-like way, too,
+as if he were a waiter, you know, passing from one
+table to another.
+
+No wonder the social fabric is crumbling when
+quite impossible people like life guards permit
+themselves to become blase' over such matters!
+
+The lower classes are very discouraging anyhow,
+don't you think? -- after all we do for them in the
+way of philanthropy and sociology and uplifting
+them generally, you know!
+
+Of course, I haven't lost my interest in sociology
+-- not by any means.  I always hold fast the thought
+that all the world are brothers.
+
+I'm taking up Dew-hopping next week. It's a
+wonderful new nerve cure.  Formerly it was quite
+the thing to walk barefoot in the dew at dawn.
+
+But at this new place I've discovered they don't
+merely walk -- that's going out, quite.  They HOP.
+Like frogs and toads, you know.
+
+It brings the patients into closer kinship with the
+electric currents of the earth, hopping does, the
+doctor says.  It's WONDERFUL!
+
+He is the loveliest man -- with mystic eyes! -- the
+doctor is.
+
+
+
+
+THE SONG OF THE SNORE
+
+Fothergil Finch, Hermione's friend, the
+vers libre poet, dodges through life harried
+and hunted by one pursuing Fear.
+
+"Some day," he said to me --
+
+(It is Hermione's Boswell who is speaking in this
+sketch, in the first person, and not Hermione, the
+incomparable.) --
+
+"Some day," Fothergil finch said to me, the
+other night, in a tone of intense, bitter conviction,
+"some day It will get me!  Some day I will overtake
+me.  The great Beat, Popularity, which pursues me!
+Some day It will clutch me and tear me
+and devour my Soul!  Some day I will be a
+Popular Writer!"
+
+It is my own impression that Fothergil's fears
+are exaggerated; but they are very real to him.  He
+visualizes his own soul as a fugitive climbing higher
+and higher, running faster and faster, to escape
+this Beast.  Perhaps Fothergil secretly hopes that
+the speed of his gong will induce combustion, and
+he will leap from the topmost hills of Art, flaming,
+directly into the heavens, there to burn and shine
+immortality, an authentic star.  Well, well, we all
+have our little plane, our little vanities!
+
+"Fothergil," I said, cheerily, "Popularity has not
+overtaken you yet.  Cheer up -- perhaps it never
+will."
+
+We were in Fothergil's studio in Greenwich Village,
+where I had gone to see how his poem on
+Moonlight was getting along.  He strode to the
+window.  Fothergil is not tall, and he is slightly
+pigeon-toed -- the fleshly toes of Fothergil symbolize
+the toes of his ever-fleecing soul -- but he strides.
+Female poets undulate.  Erotic male poets saunter.
+Tramp poets lurch and swagger.  Fothergil, being
+a vers libre poet, a Prophet of the Virile, a Little
+Brother of the Cosmic Urge, is compelled by what
+his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if
+they were vast desert places, in spite of what
+his toes are.  He strode magnificently, triumphantly,
+to the window and flung the shade up and looked
+out at the amorphous mist creeping
+in across the roofs.  The crawling fog must
+have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently
+he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a
+couch and moaned.
+
+'Ah, Heaven!  Popularity!  The disgrace of it --
+the horror of it!  Popularity!  Ignominy!  When it
+catches me -- when it happens ----"
+
+He plucked from his pocket a small phial and held
+it up toward the light and gazed upon it desperately
+and raptly.
+
+"I am never without this!" he said. "It is my
+means of escape.  I will not be taken unawares!
+I carry it always. At night it is beneath my pillow.
+The day it happens -- the moment I feel myself in
+the grip of Popularity----"
+
+I caught his hand; in his excitement he was
+raising the poison to his lips.
+
+"What I cannot understand, Fothergil," I said,
+"is why a Poet of the Virile, a Reincarnation of the
+Cave Man -- excuse me, but that is what you are
+being this year, is it not ? -- should give way to Fear.
+Is it not more in character to meet this Beast and
+slay It? Is there not a certain contradiction between
+your profession and your practice?"
+
+"More than a contradiction," he said eagerly. "It
+is more than contradictory! It is paradoxical!"
+
+I eliminate much that followed. When Fothergil
+gets started on the paradox, time passes.  He is
+never really interested in things until he has dis-
+covered the paradoxical quality in them.  Sometimes
+I think that his enthusiasm over himself is
+due to the fact that he discovered early in life that
+he himself was a paradox -- and sometimes I think
+that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm
+for the paradox.
+
+"What," said Fothergil, "is the most paradoxical
+thing in the world? The Human Snore! It seems
+Ugly-yet it is Beautiful! It seems a trivial function
+of the body -- and yet it is the Key to the
+Soul ----"
+
+"The Key to the Soul?"
+
+"Man sleeps," he said, "and his Conscious Mind
+is in abeyance. But his Subconscious Mind is still
+awake. It functions. It has its opportunity to utter
+itself. The Snore is the Voice of the Soul! And
+not only the Soul of the individual but of the Soul
+of the race.  All the experiences of man, in his
+ascent from the mire to his present altitude, are
+retained in the Subconscious Mind-his fights, his
+struggles, his falls, his recoveries. And his dreams
+and nightmares are racial memories of these things.
+Snores are the language in which he expresses them.
+Interpret the Snore, and you have the psychic history
+of the ascent of man from Caliban to Shakespeare!
+
+"And I can interpret it!  I have listened to a
+million Snores, and learned the language of the
+Soul!  Night after night, for years, I harked to
+the Human Snore -- in summer, hastening from
+park bench to beach and back again; in winter,
+haunting the missions and lodging houses.  Ah,
+Heavens! with what devotion, with what passion
+of the discoverer, have I not pursued the Human
+Snore! I have gone miles to listen to some snore
+that was reported to be peculiar; I have denied my
+self luxuries, pleasures, and at times even food, in
+order to hire reluctant persons to Snore for me!
+
+"And I have written the Epic of the Snore in
+vers libre. You shall hear the prelude!"
+
+And this is Fothergil's prelude:
+
+
+Snore me a song of the soul,
+Oh, sleeper, snore!
+Whistle me, wheeze me, grunkle and grunt, gurgle
+  and snort me a Virile stave!
+Snore till the Cosmos shakes!
+On the wings of a snore I fly backward a billion
+  years, and grasp the mastodon and I tear him
+  limb from limb,
+And with his thigh hone I heat the dinosaur to
+  death, for I am Virile!
+Snore!  Snore!  Snore!
+Snore, O struggling and troubled and squirming
+  and suffering and choking and purple-faced
+  sleeper, snore!
+Snore me the sound of the brutal struggle when the
+  big bull planets bellowed and fought with one
+  another. in the bloody dawn of time for the
+  love of little yellow-haired moons,
+Snore!
+Snore till Chaos raps with his boot on the walls of
+Cosmos and kicks to the landlord!
+
+Turn, choke, twist and struggle, sleeper, and snore
+   me the song of life in the making,
+Sneeze me a universe full of star-dust,
+Snore me back to the days when I was a Cave Man,
+  and with my bare hands slew the walrus, for
+  I am Virile!
+Snore the death-rattle of the walrus, O struggling
+  sleeper, snore!
+Snore me ----
+
+
+But I was compelled to leave. There is a great
+deal of it, Fothergil says. If you know Fothergil
+you are aware that when he declaims his Virile
+verses he becomes excited; he swells physically;
+sometimes he looks quite five feet tall in his moments
+of expansion; all this is very bad for him.
+More than once the declamation of his poem,
+"Myself and the Cosmic Urge," has sent him shaking
+to the tea urn.
+
+Before I left I was able to calm him somewhat.
+But with calm came reflection. And with reflection
+came his great, gray Dread again.
+
+When I left,. Fothergil was looking out of the
+window and shuddering, as if the Monster
+Popularity might be hiding behind the neighboring
+chimneys. One hand clasped the phial caressingly.
+
+But somehow I doubt that Fothergil will ever be
+compelled to drink the poison.
+
+
+
+
+BALLADE OF UNDERSTANDING
+
+"Does not the World's stupidity
+At times make Serious Thinkers fret?"
+I asked the fair Hermione;
+  "Sometimes," she said, "and  yet . . . and
+    yet .
+
+We feel we owe the World a debt!"
+She waved a slim, bejeweled hand,
+She brooded on some vague regret. .
+  "I hope," she sighed, "you'll UNDERSTAND!"
+
+"Is not your high Philosophy
+Too subtle for the Mob to get?"
+I asked . . . She pondered seriously;
+  "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and
+    yet . . .
+
+She trifled with an amulet
+Imported from some Orient land. . . .
+"What fish can burst the Cosmic Net? . . .
+  I HOPE," she sighed, "you'll Understand."
+
+"Art, Science and Psychology,
+Causes that rise and shine and set,
+
+Do all these never weary thee?" --
+  "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet .
+Would Thought and Life have ever met
+Unless" . . . She paused. Her lashes fanned
+Her eyes, with tears of ardor wet. . . .
+  "I hope," she sighed,  "YOU'LL Understand!"
+
+"Princess, is Bull the One Best Bet?"-
+  "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet
+She mused, and then; in accents bland,
+"I hope," she said, "you'll UNDERSTAND!"
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE ON FASHIONS AND WAR
+
+ISN'T war frightful, though; simply FRIGHTFUL!
+
+What Sherman said it was, you know.
+
+Though they say there's an economic
+condition back of this war, too.
+
+We took up economics not long ago -- our Little
+Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and gave
+an entire evening to it.
+
+It's wonderful; simply WONDERFUL!
+
+Without economics, you know, there couldn't be
+any Civilization.
+
+That's a thought that should give one pause,
+isn't it?
+
+Although, of course, this war may destroy
+civilization entirely.
+
+If I thought it was likely to do that I would join
+in the Peace Demonstration at once -- or have they
+had it already ? -- the march for peace, you know!
+Anyhow, no matter what the personal sacrifice
+might be, I would join in. Not that I care to march
+in the dust. And black never did become me. But
+I suppose there will be some autos.  And, well --
+one must sacrifice.
+
+For if Civilization dies out, what will become of
+us then?
+
+Will we revert to the Primordial?
+
+Will the Cave Man triumph?
+
+The very idea gives me the creeps!
+
+Because, you know, the Cave Man is all right --
+and the Primitive, and all that -- as a protest against
+Decadence-and in a LITERARY way -- but if ALL men were Cave Men!
+
+Well, you know, the thought is frightful; simply frightful!
+
+You can have a feeling for just ONE Cave Man,
+you know, in the midst of Civilization, when a
+MILLION Cave Men would ----
+
+But the idea is too terrible for words!
+
+And in this crisis it is Woman who must save the world.
+
+The loveliest woman -- she's quite advanced,
+really, and has the most charming toilettes -- told
+our Little Group of Serious Thinkers the other
+night that this is the time when Woman must rule
+the world.
+
+It is the test of the New Woman.
+
+If ANYTHING is saved from the wreck it will be
+because of Her.
+
+She can write letters to the papers, you know,
+against war and-and all that sort of thing, you know.
+
+And, of course, if the Germans and Russians and
+English do all get together and conquer Paris,
+I suppose they won't kill the modistes and designers.
+
+Civilization, you know, is not so easily killed
+after all. The Romans were conquered, you know,
+but all their styles and philosophies and things were
+taken up by the Medes and Persians who conquered
+them, and have remained unchanged in those
+countries ever since.
+
+But in a time like this, it's comforting to have
+a Cause to cling to.
+
+No matter what happens, the advanced thinkers
+must cling together and make their Cause count.
+
+And if England should conquer France, and put
+a king on the throne there again, no doubt there will
+be a great revival of fashion, as there was in the
+days of Napoleon I. and the Empress Eugenie.
+
+But if all the advanced thinkers in the world
+could only get together in one place and THINK Peace
+and Harmony -- sit down in circles, you know, and
+send Psychic Vibrations across the ocean -- who can
+tell but what the war might not end ?
+
+The triumph of mind over matter, you know.
+
+I'm going to propose the idea to our little group
+and pass it on to all the other little groups.
+
+I'd be willing to give up an entire evening to it myself.
+
+
+
+
+URGES AND DOGS
+
+We had quite a discussion the other evening
+-- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
+you know -- as to whether it was Idealism
+or Materialism that had gotten the Germans into
+this dreadful war.
+
+Isn't Idealism just simply wonderful!
+
+Fothy Finch said it was neither; he said it was
+the Racial Urge.
+
+It's like the Cosmic Urge, you know; except it's
+altogether German, Fothy explained.
+
+Every once in a while you hear of a New Urge.
+That's one of the things that distinguishes Modern
+Thought from the old philosophies, don't you
+think?
+
+Although, of course, the Cosmic Urge isn't what
+it used to be a year or two ago.
+
+It's become -- er -- well, VULGARIZED, if you know
+what I mean. EVERYBODY'S writing and talking
+about it now, don't you know.
+
+I think, myself, it's going out soon.  And a
+leader -- a real pioneer in thought, you know,
+would scarcely care to talk about it now without a
+smile.
+
+I've just about dropped it myself.  It's the same
+way with everything exclusive.  It soon becomes
+common.
+
+Really, I hadn't worn my white summer furs
+three weeks before I saw so many imitations that
+I just simply HAD to lay them aside.
+
+Don't you think people who take up things
+like that, after the real leaders have dropped them,
+are frightfully lacking in SUBTLETY?
+
+Oh, Subtlety! Subtlety! WHAT would modern
+thought be without Subtlety?
+
+Personally, I just simply HATE the Obvious.  It's
+so -- so -- well, so easily seen through, if you know
+what I mean.
+
+Fothy Finch said to me only the other day, "Has
+it ever occurred to you, Hermione, that you are NOT
+an Obvious sort of Person?"
+
+It is almost UNCANNY the way Fothergil Finch
+can read my thoughts sometimes.  We are both so
+very psychic.
+
+Mamma said to me last night, "You are seeing a
+great deal of Mr. Finch, Hermione.  Do you think
+it is right to encourage him if you don't intend to
+marry him?  What ARE your intentions with regard
+to Mr. Finch?"
+
+I didn't answer her at all -- poor dear Mamma is
+SO old-fashioned!
+
+But I thought to myself ----
+
+Well, would it be so IMPOSSIBLE?
+
+Of course, marriage is a serious thing.  One must
+look at it from all points of view, if one has a
+Social Conscience.
+
+He has a LOVELY way with dogs, Fothy has.  They
+trust him instinctively -- he is just DEAR with them.
+I have some beauties now, you know.  They are
+getting so they won't let anyone but Fothy bathe them.
+
+
+
+
+MOODS AND POPPIES
+
+We took up the Bhagavad Gita -- our Little
+Group of Advanced Thinkers, you know --
+in quite a thorough way the other
+evening.
+
+Isn't the Bhagavad Gita just simply WONDERFUL!
+
+It has nothing at all to do with Bagdad, you
+know -- though at first glance it seems quite like
+it might, doesn't it?
+
+Of course, they're both Oriental -- aren't you just
+simply WILD about Oriental things?  But really,
+they're QUITE different.
+
+The Bhagavad Gita, you know, is all about
+Reincarnation and Karma, and all those lovely old
+things.
+
+When I start my Salon I'm going to have a
+Bhagavad Gita Evening -- all in costume, you know.
+
+I find that when I dress in harmony with the
+Idea I RADIATE so much more effectively, if you
+get what I mean.
+
+Fothergil Finch is the same way.
+
+He writes his best vers libre things in a purple
+dressing-gown.
+
+There's an amber-colored pane of glass in his
+studio skylight, and he has to sit and wait and wait
+and wait until the moonlight falls through that pane
+onto his paper, and then it only stays long enough
+so he can write a few lines, and he can't go on with
+the poem until he comes again.
+
+He brought me one last night -- he wrote it to me
+  yes, really! -- and he waited and waited for
+enough moonlight to do it, and caught a terrible
+cold in his head, poor dear Fothy.
+
+It goes like this:
+
+Poppies, poppies, silver poppies in the moonlight,
+   poppies!
+Silver poppies,
+Silver poppies in the moonlight,
+Youth!
+Poppies poppies, crimson poppies in the sunset,
+   Love!
+Poppies, poppies, poppies!
+Black poppies in the midnight,
+Death!
+Three colors of poppies!
+One color is silver,
+The second color is crimson,
+The third color is black,
+And if there were a fourth color it would be
+green!
+
+Alas!  Why is there never a fourth color?
+
+Poppies, poppies, poppies, but no Green Poppy!
+
+I asked the little crippled girl who sells poppies to
+   Buy bread for the drunken father who beats her,
+
+And she said, "I, too, seek the fourth color!"
+
+I asked the boy who drives the grocer's delivery
+   wagon, the old apple woman without teeth, the
+   morgue keeper, the plumber, the janitor, the
+   red-armed waffle baker in the window of a
+   restaurant full of marble-topped tables and
+   pallid-looking girls, the subway guard and the
+   millionaire,
+
+And they all said,
+"Poppies, poppies, poppies,
+We have never known but three colors!"
+I am a Great Virile Spirit;
+I, with my Ego,
+I will give the world its Desire!
+I, the strong!
+I, the daring!
+I will create a Green Poppy!
+
+That about being Virile is just like Fothy!  He
+prides himself on being Virile, you know -- Poor
+dear Fothy!
+
+He said until he saw me he had always been satisfied
+with silver and red and black poppies, but
+as soon as he knew me he felt there MUST be a
+Green Poppy somewhere.
+
+It is likely a mood of my soul, you know -- the
+Green Poppy is!
+
+Isn't it simply wonderful!
+
+
+
+
+CONCENTRATION
+
+Isn't it just simply terrible the way the Balkans
+are bombarding Venice . . . all those beautiful
+Doges and things, you know.
+
+I suppose there will be nothing left, just simply
+nothing, of the city that Byron wrote about in
+in -- what was it?  Oh, yes, in "Childe Harold to
+the Dark Tower Came."
+
+That's one comforting thing to think of if this
+country ever gets into a war, isn't it?   I mean that
+we haven't any of those lovely old things that can
+be bombarded, you know.
+
+I suppose if we ever did get into war someone
+like Edison would invent something quick, you
+know, and it would be all over in a few hours.
+
+Isn't inventive science wonderful!  Just simply
+wonderful!
+
+It's so -- so -- well, so DYNAMIC, if you get what I
+mean.  Isn't it?
+
+Don't you just DOTE on dynamic things?
+
+Dynamic personalities, especially.
+
+I've often thought if I had it to do over again
+I'd go in less for psychics and more for dynamics.
+
+But then there are so many things that a modern
+thinker must keep up with, aren't there?
+
+And it's easy enough to concentrate one's mind on
+one or two things, but I often find it terribly difficult
+to concentrate on ten or twelve different things
+all at the same time.
+
+And one must if one is to keep up with the very
+latest in Thought and Life.
+
+Concentration!  Concentration!  That is the key
+to it all!  Nearly every night when I am alone with
+my own Ego I go into the Silences for a little period
+of Spiritual Self-Examination and I always ask
+myself: "Have I Concentrated today?  Really
+Concentrated?  Or have I failed?"
+
+I call these little times my Psychic Inquisitions.
+
+In the hurry of this crowded age one must find
+time to get along with one's self, must one not?
+Fothy Finch has written a beautiful thing about the
+hurry of this crowded age which I wish everyone
+could hang over his desk.
+
+Well, I must be going on now.  I have a committee
+meeting for this afternoon.  I can't for the
+life of me remember whether it's about suffrage --
+Oh, yes, I marched! -- or about some relief fund.
+
+
+
+
+SOUL MATES
+
+I'm taking up Bergson this week.
+
+Next week I'm going to take up Etruscan
+vases and the Montessori system.
+
+Oh, no, I haven't lost my interest in sociology.
+
+Only the other night we went down in the auto
+and watch the bread line.
+
+Of course, one can take up TOO MANY things.
+
+It's the spirit in which you take up a thing that
+counts.
+
+Sometimes I think the spirit in which you take
+a thing up counts more than the thing itself -- counts
+in its effect on you, you know.
+
+Of course, the way to get the real meaning out
+of any thing is to put yourself in a receptive attitude.
+
+In serious things the attitude counts for everything.
+One mustn't scoff.
+
+If you look seriously and scientifically you'll'
+see there's a great deal more than you suspected
+in all this affinity and soul mate craze, for instance.
+
+Not that I care much for the words "soul mate"
+and "affinity" particularly; they have been so
+VULGARIZED, somehow.
+
+The Best People don't use those terms any more.
+
+Psychic harmony is the new term.
+
+The loveliest man explained all about it to us the
+other day.  I belong to a Little Group of Thinkers,
+who take a serious interest in these things, you
+know.
+
+We are trying to find out how to make our
+psychic powers count for the betterment of the
+world.  I am very psychic.  Some are now.
+
+This man had the most interesting eyes and the
+silkiest beard, and he said his aura was pink.
+
+If he should meet a girl, you know, with an aura
+just the shade of pink that his aura is, why then
+they would know they were in psychic harmony.
+
+Simple, isn't it?  But then all truly great ideas
+ARE simple, aren't they?
+
+But if his aura was blue, and her aura was yellow,
+then, of course, they would quarrel.  That's
+what makes so much domestic unhappiness.
+
+But he said something that gave me the most
+frightfully insecure feeling.
+
+He said the aura CHANGES its color as the soul progresses.
+
+Two people may be in harmony today, and both
+have pink auras, and in a year hers may be green
+and his golden.
+
+What desperate chances a woman takes when
+she marries, doesn't she?
+
+I sometimes think life must have been a much
+more comfortable thing before the world got to
+be so terribly advanced.
+
+But, of course, it is our duty to sacrifice personal
+comfort for the future of the race and the
+betterment of the world.
+
+As I was looking at the bread line the thought
+came to me that the chief difference between this
+advanced age and other ages was in the fact that
+people today are willing to take a serious interest
+in such things.
+
+People are willing to sacrifice themselves today,
+you know.
+
+It is food for optimism, don't you think?
+
+Not that I was really so uncomfortable in the
+auto, you know.  I had on my new mink coat.
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE TAKES UP LITERATURE
+
+We've been going in for Astrological
+Research lately -- our Little Group of
+Modern Thinkers, you know -- and we've
+picked our own personal stars.
+
+Only it seems such a shame, doesn't it, that one
+isn't allowed to CHANGE stars?  Keeping the same
+star all your life is rather monotonous, don't you
+think?
+
+Though, of course, if one changed and got some-
+one else's star things might be frightfully
+complicated, mightn't they?
+
+But it would make a charming little story,
+wouldn't it, for a girl to change stars, you know,
+and find that her new star belonged to some quite
+nice young man, and, of course, after that, their
+destinies would be one.
+
+I get some of the most ORIGINAL plots for stories!
+
+Fothergil Finch has often said to me that that
+is one difference between genius and talent.  When
+you have genius, you know, things like that just
+come to you; but if you only have talent you must
+work and WORK for them.
+
+"If I only hd your spontaneity, Hermione!"
+Fothergil often says.
+
+And really, it's never been any trouble for me at
+all to dash off an idea, though of course they
+would have to be touched up by the editors a little
+before they could be printed.
+
+Fothergil said the other night I should try poetry.
+
+"Why, Fothy," I said, "if I lived a hundred years
+I never could make two lines rhyme with each
+other!"
+
+But he said Rhyme was out of fashion anyhow,
+and -- would you believe it? -- while we were talking
+I got an idea for a poem and just dashed it off
+then and there -- a vers libre poem you know, and it
+goes:
+
+   What becomes of
+   People when they die?
+   I used to ask when I was a little child,
+   And now even since
+   I am grown up I am not sure that I know!
+
+"Fothy," I said, "It was so easy -- that makes me
+afraid it isn't really good!"
+
+"Ah," he said, "that modesty PROVES you are a
+genius!  Heavens, what would I not give to
+have you spontaneity, your modesty, your spontaneity   --"
+
+But I interrupted him.  Another idea had come
+to me -- just like that, and -- would you believe it?
+I dashed off another one, right then and there!  It
+went:
+
+   I see the rain fall.
+   It is no effort for the rain to fall.
+   Why is it no effort?
+   Because it falls spontaneously!
+   O Spontaneity!  Spontaneity!
+   Rain is genius,
+   Genius is rain!
+   Fall, fall, rain!
+
+Fothy is going to get them printed -- he knows a
+lot of vers libre publishers -- if Papa will only put
+up the money.  And one nice thing about poor dear
+Papa is that he always will put it up.
+
+So that night I wrote twenty or thirty more
+of them, and they were ALL good -- ALL works of
+genius -- they ALL came to me just like the first ones!
+
+The last one came to me just as I was going to
+bed.  I looked out of the window and saw the moon
+and ran and got a pencil and wrote:
+
+   I see the moon out of the window.
+   I wonder what it thinks of me?
+   Wouldn't the moon and I both be surprised
+   If we found that neither of us
+   Though anything at all about the other?
+
+The book's going to be vellum, you know, and
+that sort of thing.  I'm going to have a gown just
+like the cover and give a fete when it comes out.
+
+The worst thing about being literary, though, is
+that it makes one feel so RESPONSIBLE for the gift,
+if you know what I mean, doesn't it?
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD IS GETTING BETTER
+
+DR. JAGADES CHUNDER BOSE says that
+plants are almost as sensitive as human beings --
+they have feelings and susceptibilities,
+you know, and all that sort of thing.
+
+Isn't it wonderful how the Hindus find these
+things out?
+
+Soul speaking to soul, I suppose.
+
+But I have scarcely been able to eat comfortably
+since I read it.
+
+Every time I sit down to a salad it makes me
+feel quite like a cannibal!
+
+And to think, I was just on the point of becoming
+a vegetarian, too!
+
+I suppose to be on the safe side one should eat
+nothing but minerals.
+
+But, of course, advanced thinkers will have to
+take the matter up seriously and discover a way
+out -- some day we will live on aromas and
+electricity, no doubt.
+
+Don't you think the world is getting kinder?
+A hundred years ago, for instance, no one would
+have cared whether plants suffer pain or not -- people
+wouldn't have given it a second though, you know.
+
+And now, though, they will have to keep on
+eating them until something else is invented, they
+will do it with a shudder and won't enjoy them near
+so much.  The world is losing much of its cruelty
+and thoughtlessness.  Upward!  Onward!  Is the
+slogan.
+
+Do you like my new coat?  Unborn lamb skin,
+you know.  Isn't it lovely?
+
+
+
+
+WAR AND ART
+
+THIS war is going to have a tremendous in-
+fluence on Art -- vitalize it, you know, and
+make it REAL, and all that sort of thing.
+In fact, it's doing it already.  We took up the war
+last night -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
+you know -- in quite a serious way and considered
+it thoroughly in all its aspects and we decided
+that it would put more SOUL into Art.
+
+And into life, too, you know.
+
+Already you can see it on every hand how much
+serious purpose it is putting into lives that were
+merely trivial before.  Even poor, dear Mamma --
+and really, it would be hard to imagine a more
+trivial person than Mamma! -- is knitting socks.
+
+She is going to send them to the Poles.  She
+wanted to send them to the Belgians.
+
+But I said to her, "Positively, Mamma, you are
+ALWAYS behind the times.  Don't you know the
+Belgians are going out and the Poles are coming in?"
+
+And, you know, it's been months since really
+Smart People have knit for the Belgians.  The Poles
+are QUITE the thing now.
+
+It's strange how great movements keep going on
+and on from mountain peak to mountain peak of
+usefulness like that, isn't it? -- changing their
+direction now and then as evolution itself does,
+but always progressing, progressing!
+
+That is one wonderful thing about evolution -- it
+ALWAYS progresses.
+
+When one thinks it over, one grows more and
+more conscious that the human race owes a great
+deal to Evolution, doesn't one?
+
+WHAT could we have done without it?
+
+It's as somebody said about something else one
+time -- if we hadn't had it, you know, it would have
+been necessary to invent it, though for the life of
+me, I can't remember who it was or what he said
+about it.  Although likely it was Madame de Stael.
+We took her up once and it developed that she had
+said a most surprising number of things like that
+things, you know, that would be quite quotable if
+you could only remember them.
+
+Isn't memory a wonderful facility, though?
+
+I've always intended to go in for developing mine
+systematically and scientifically.
+
+But I've never done it because I always forget
+whether I should order the book-shop people to
+send home a work on numismatics or a work on
+mnemonics.  One of them is about money, you
+know, and the other is about memory.  And once
+when I was shopping and thought I had it right it
+turned out -- the book did, when I got it home -- to
+be all about air and things.  Pneumatics, you know!
+Wasn't it perfectly ridiculous?
+
+But, of course, one learns by one's mistakes.
+
+Have you seen dear Nijinsky?
+
+We were discussing him last evening -- our little
+group, you know -- and decided that while he has
+more Personality than Mordkin he has less
+Temperament, if you get what I mean.
+
+One of the girls said last evening, "Mordkin is
+more exotic, but Nijinsky is more esoteric."
+
+And another said, "One of them shows intellect
+obviously mingled with spirit, but the other shows
+spirit occultly mingled with intellect."
+
+Fothergil Finch said, "They are alike in their
+differences, but subtly differentiated in their
+likenesses, n'est-cd pas?"
+
+Fothy has a simply delightful faculty of summing
+a thing up in a sentence like that, but it makes him
+very vain if you show you think so; so I put him
+in his place and closed the discussion with one remark:
+
+"It is all," I said, "it is ALL a question of Interpretation."
+
+And, quite seriously, when you come to think
+about it, it usually is, isn't it?
+
+
+
+
+A SPIRITUAL DIALOGUE
+
+Last night I met Hermione,
+And eagerly she said to me:
+"Thoughts from the ambient everywhere
+Electrify our worldly air."
+
+"My soul," I said, "grabs off such hints
+As butter, whether pats or prints,
+Receives and holds all unaware
+Small strands of drifting, golden hair.
+But have YOU thought, O Maiden fair,
+O, have you thought profoundly of
+The psychic consciousness in crows?
+Or why the Malay when in love
+Wears rubber earrings on his toes?"
+
+The lady shook her lovely head --
+'Twas coiffed divinely -- and she said:
+"Have you reflected on the part
+Primeval instinct plays in Art?
+It's simply wonderful the way
+Old things grow new from day to day!"
+
+"That's true," I said, "I often ape
+The Ape to get my Art in shape --
+And with the Simian going strong,
+ Behold, another Rennysawng!"
+
+"Perhaps," she said, "across the verge
+Of darkness, from the Cosmic Urge,
+The Light is speeding in bright waves,
+E'en now to show the way to slaves!"
+
+"The thought," I said, "is cheerful -- but
+These Swamis WILL chew betel-nut!"
+
+"Alas!" she said, "alas!  too true!
+But oh!  it's wonderful of you
+To sympathize and understand   --"
+(She gestured with a jeweled hand) --
+"The joy of being understood!"
+
+"Our talk," I said, "has done me good."
+
+
+
+
+WILL THE BEST PEOPLE
+RECEIVE THE SUPERMAN SOCIALLY?
+
+WE'VE been taking up Metabolism lately --
+our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you
+know -- and it's wonderful; just simply
+WONDERFUL!
+
+I really don't know how I got along for so many
+years without it -- it opens up such new vistas,
+doesn't it?
+
+I can never think in the same way again about
+even the most trivial things since I have learned
+all about Protoplasm and -- and -- well, all these
+marvelous scientific things, you know.
+
+Isn't Science DELIGHTFUL!
+
+There's the Cosmos, for instance.  It had always
+been there, you know.  But nobody knew much
+about it until Scientists took it up in a serious way.
+
+And now I, for one, feel that I couldn't do
+without it!
+
+Although, of course, one feels one's responsibilities
+toward it too, and that is apt to be rather
+trying at times unless one has a truly earnest nature
+and is prepared to make sacrifices.
+
+If the Cosmos is to be improved, what is there
+that can improve it except Evolution?
+
+And unless we who are serious thinkers give
+Evolution a mark to reach, how can we be sure that
+Evolution will Evolve in the right direction?
+
+I have worried myself half to death at times
+over the Superman!
+
+You know I feel personally responsible, to a
+certain extent, about what he will be like when he
+gets here.  If he isn't what he should be, you know,
+it will be the fault of those of us who are the
+leaders in thought today -- it will be because we
+haven't started him right, you know.
+Mamma -- poor dear Mamma is SO unadvanced,
+you know! -- has an idea that when the Superman
+does get here he won't be at all the sort of person
+that one would care to receive socially.
+
+"Hermione," she said to me only the other day,
+"no Superman shall EVER come into MY house!"
+
+She heard some of my friends, you know, talking
+about the Superman and Eugenics, and she has
+an idea that he will be horribly improper.
+
+"I consider that the Superman would be a DANGEROUS
+influence in the life of a young woman," said Mamma.
+
+"Mamma," I told her, you are FRIGHTFULLY behind
+the times!  There isn't a doubt in the world that
+when the Superman does come he will be taken
+up by the Best People.  Anarchists and Socialists
+go everywhere now, and dress just like other people,
+and ;you can hardly tell them, and it will be
+the same way with the Superman."
+
+What Mamma lacks is contact.  Contact with --
+with -- well, she lacks Contact, if you get what I
+mean.
+
+So many of the elder generation DO lack Contact,
+don't you think?
+
+Although, of course, it would be very hard to
+have Contact and Background at the same time.
+
+And if one must choose between Contact and
+Background, the choice is apt to be puzzling at
+times.
+
+Although, of course, it is useless to reason too
+much on things like that.  Intuition often succeeds
+where reason fails, especially if one is at all Psychic.
+
+Well, I must go.  I must hurry to my costumer's.
+
+I'm have a special costume made, you know.
+We've been taking up Spiritualism again -- our little
+group, you know.  And I'm going to give a Spirit
+Fete, and of course it will take a great deal of
+dressing and arranging and decoration.
+
+Papa says it will be a Ghost Dance, but he is so
+terribly frivolous and irreverent at times.
+
+Don't you just simply LOATHE frivolity?
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PARASITE WOMAN MUST GO!
+
+THE Parasite Woman must go!
+
+Our Little Group of Serious Thinkers
+took up the Parasite Woman last night in
+quite a thorough way.  One of the most interesting
+women you ever listened to gave us a little talk
+about the Parasite Woman, you know.
+
+And we decided that the Parasite Woman has
+NOTHING to Contribute to the Next Generation.
+
+Oh, these Parasite Women!  It just simply makes
+my blood boil to her about them!  I don't know
+when I have been so indignant!
+
+With the world so full of work to be done for
+the Cause -- for ALL the Causes, you know -- they
+just sit around selfishly at home all wrapped up
+in their own families, or children, if they're married,
+and do nothing at all for the Evolution of
+the Ego and the Development of the Race, and the
+Conscious Guidance of the Next Generation, or
+anything like that.
+
+Thank goodness I could never be a Parasite Woman!
+
+And, yet, I PITY them, too.
+
+I'm thinking quite seriously of starting a little
+Mission of my own for the purpose of appealing
+to and reforming the Parasite Women among my
+acquaintances.
+
+Of course it will take organization, and that
+means I will have money to start it and
+keep it going.
+
+But Papa will give me the money all right.  That
+is one thing about poor, dear Papa -- he doesn't
+understand the new movements at all, but he WILL
+give me money.  And he never asks what I do
+with it.
+
+Now and then, of course, he scolds me a little -- he
+told me the other day that I cost him nearly as much
+as a war.  But I can always jolly him, you know,
+when he gets that way.  Men are so easily managed
+and flattered.
+
+I suppose my Mission will take quite a LOT of
+money, too.  But it is my DUTY, and I am willing to
+make ANY sacrifice -- we modern thinkers are used
+to making sacrifices for our Cause!
+
+And it is worth a lot of sacrifice to make the
+Parasite Woman over into an Awakened and
+Enlightened Member of Society, independent of the
+Man-Made System that has shackled her for so long.
+
+What is nobler than Emancipation?
+
+Of course, I'll have to have a Secretary, And
+to get one especially training in organizing the
+Mission will cost quite a bit, probably.
+
+But Papa will never miss it.
+
+And I think I'll have a MAN for a Secretary.
+One that is quite presentable socially, you
+know.  For the Secretary will have to attend to a
+lot of the details.  I will give some teas and
+entertainments and things, just to get the Parasite
+Women I know interested.
+
+And there's nothing like the right sort of a man
+to get women to cooperate in some Cause that aims
+for Woman's Liberty.
+
+And I suppose, really, TWO Secretaries would be
+better.  And they will have to be men who can
+dance the new dances well, too.  That counts a
+lot nowadays in getting girls to come to places.
+
+I feel that I have Found my Work!  One's work
+lies at one's hand, if one could but see it, always.
+And mine is to Save the Parasite Women I know
+from Themselves and their Frivolity.
+
+I will coax the first cheque out of Papa this very
+evening!  It may take some management and
+jollying, but--well, Papa is EASY!
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
+
+WE'RE taking up the House Beautiful -- our
+Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you
+know -- for we've decided that Environment
+has more effect on personality than Heredity.
+
+Interior decoration is the greatest of the arts --
+don't you think? -- because it furnishes the proper
+setting for the spirit.
+
+The loveliest woman gave us a talk on interior
+decoration the other night -- she wears these slinky,
+Greek things, you know, with straw sandals, when
+the weather permits -- and I engaged her to do the
+house over.
+
+But right away a problem presented itself --
+whether to have the house done to fit my personality
+or whether to have the house done to fit the thing
+I want my personality to evolve into, and trust the
+environment to help in the evolution.
+
+Modern thought complicates LIFE immensely,
+doesn't it?
+
+But I always feel that it is my duty to give the
+best in myself to these problems.
+
+Someone must help Evolution evolve.  Someone
+must be unselfish enough to give the cosmos new
+marks to come up to.
+
+And who but the serious thinkers are willing to
+sacrifice themselves?
+
+Well, we finally decided to do every room in
+the house differently -- each one to fit a mood, you
+know.
+
+There's one room now I call "Aspiration," where
+I go for my little spiritual examinations.
+
+And the next room beyond that is "Resolve."
+
+And then there's a room I call "Brotherly Love,"
+where I go to think out how to help the masses.
+
+For of course I haven't lost my interest in
+sociological problems.
+
+In fact I'm having some new dresses made --
+simple, quiet looking things, you know -- for the
+express purpose of visiting the very poor in and
+asking them questions about themselves.
+
+Though I must admit that since helping the war
+sufferers came into fashion friendly visiting has
+rather gone out.
+
+
+
+
+MAMA IS SO MID-VICTORIAN
+
+WE'VE been taking ;up Hedonism lately --
+our Little Group of Modern Thinkers,
+you know -- and it's wonderful, just
+simply WONDERFUL!
+
+Though Mamma -- poor dear Mamma is so
+hopelessly old fashioned; -- has entirely the
+wrong idea about it.
+
+"Hermione," she said to me the other evening,
+after the little talk, "WHAT did the lecturer call
+himself?"
+
+"He's a Hedonist," I said.
+
+"Indeed!" she said, "and what sort of modern
+impropriety is Hedonism?  Is it something about
+Sex, or is it something about Psychics?"
+
+I simply couldn't speak.
+
+I just gave her a look and walked out of the
+room.  It is absolutely useless to attempt to explain
+anything to Mamma.
+
+She is so Mid-Victorian!
+
+And Mid-Victorianism has quite gone out, you
+know.  Really.  The loveliest man gave us a talk
+on the Mid-Victorian recently, and when he was
+done there wasn't a one of us that didn't go and
+hide our Tennysons and Ruskins.
+
+Although I always WILL like "Come into the Garden, Maud."
+
+But he did it with such HUMOR, you know.  Isn't
+a sense of humor a perfectly WONDERFUL thing?
+
+A sense of humor is a sense of proportion, you
+know -- he brought that out so cleverly, the
+anti-Mid-Victorian man did.
+
+Though so many people who have a sense of
+humor are so -- so, well so QUEER about it, if you
+get what I mean.  That is, if you know they have
+one, of course you're naturally watching for them
+to say humorous things; and they're forever saying
+the sort of things that puzzle you, because you have
+never heard those things before in just that way,
+and if you DO laugh they're so apt to act as if you
+were laughing in the WRONG place!
+
+And one doesn't dare NOT to laugh, does one?
+It's really quite unfair and unkind sometimes!
+Don't you think so?
+
+We took up a volume on The Analysis of Humor
+one winter -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
+you know -- and read it completely through, and
+before the winter was over it got so there wasn't
+a one of us that dared NOT to laugh at anything
+any other one said and -- well, it got rather ghastly
+before spring.  Because even if someone wanted to
+know if a person needed an umbrella someone else
+would laugh.
+
+Well, I must be going now.  I have a committee
+meeting at three this afternoon.  We're going in
+for this one-day Women's Strike, you know -- our
+little group is.
+
+
+
+
+VOKE EASELEY AND HIS NEW ART
+
+FOR my acquaintance with Voke Easeley --  --
+
+(Hermione's reporter, and not Hermione
+herself, is speaking now.) --  --
+
+For my acquaintance with Voke Easeley and his
+new art, I am indebted to Fothergil Finch.
+
+Fothergil is a kind of genius hound.  He scurries
+sleuthing around the town ever on the scent of
+something queer and caviar.  He is well trained and
+never kills what he catches himself; he takes it to
+Hermione; and after Hermione has tired of it I
+am at liberty to do what I please with it.
+
+The most remarkable thing about Voke Easeley
+at a casual glance is his Adam's apple.  It is not
+only the largest Adam's apple I have ever seen, and
+the hardest looking one, and the most active one,
+but it is also the most intelligent looking one.  Voke
+Easeley's face expresses very little.  His eyes are
+small and full and green. His mouth, while large,
+misses significance.  His nose, indeed, is big; but
+it is mild; it is a tame nose; one feels no more
+character in it than in a false nose.  His chin
+and forehead retreat ingloriously from the battle
+of life.
+
+But all the personality which his eyes should
+show, all the force which should dwell in his
+nose, all the temperamental qualities that should
+reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the
+genius which should illumine his brow -- these dwell
+within his Adam's apple.  The man has run entirely
+to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his
+thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his
+doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his
+despairs, his defeats, his exaltations -- all, all make
+themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions
+of that unusual Adam's apple.
+
+When I saw him first in action I did not at once
+get it.  He stood stiffly erect in the center of
+Hermione's drawing-room, surrounded by the serious
+thinkers, with his head thrown back and his Adam's
+apple thrust forward, and gave vent to a series of
+strange noises.  Beside him stood a very slender
+lady, all dressed in apple green, with a long green
+wand in her hand, and on the end of the wand
+was an artificial apple blossom.  This she waved
+jerkily in front of Voke Easeley's eyes, and his
+Adam's apple moved as the wand moved, and from
+his mouth came the wild sounds in response to it.
+
+Soon I realized that she was conducting him as
+if he were an orchestra.
+
+But still I did not get it.  For it was not words,
+it was nothing so articulate as speech, that Voke
+Easeley uttered.  Nor was it, to my ear, song.  And
+yet, as I listened, I began to see that a wild rhythm
+pervaded the utterance; the Adam;'s apple leapt,
+danced, swung round, twinkled, bounded, slid and
+leapt again in time with a certain rough barbaric
+measure; the sounds themselves were all discords,
+but discords with a purpose; discords that took each
+other by the hand and kicked and stamped their
+brutal way together toward some objective point.
+
+I led Fothergil into a corner.
+
+"What is it?" I whispered.  It is always well, at
+one of Hermione's soul fights, to get your cue
+before the conversation officially starts.  If you don't
+know what is going to be talked about before the
+talk starts the chances are that you never will know
+from the talk itself.
+
+"A New Art!" said Fothergil.  And then he led
+me into the hall and explained.
+
+What Gertrude Stein has done for prose, what
+the wilder vers libre bards are doing for poetry,
+what cubists and futurists are doing for painting
+and sculpture, that Voke Easeley is doing for
+vocal music.
+
+"He is painting sound portraits with his larynx
+now," said Fothergil.  "And the beautiful part of
+it is that he is absolutely tone deaf!  He doesn't
+know a thing about music.  He tried for years to
+learn and couldn't.  The only way he knows when
+you strike a chord on the piano is because he doesn't
+like chords near as well as he does discords.  He
+has gone right back to the dog, the wolf, the cave
+man, the tiger, the bear, the wind, the rock slide,
+the thunder and the earthquake for his language.
+He interprets life in the terms of natural sounds,
+which are discords nearly always; but he has added
+brains to them and made them all the moods of
+the human soul!"
+
+"And the lady in green?"
+
+"That is his wife -- he can do nothing without
+her.  There is the most complete psychic accord
+between them.  It is beautiful!  Beautiful!"
+
+When we returned the lady in green was
+announcing:
+
+"The next selection is a Voke Easeley impression
+of the Soul of Wagner gazing at the sunrise from
+the peak of the Jungfrau."
+
+The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and
+they were off.  What followed cannot be indicated
+typographically.  But if a cat were a sawmill, and
+a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bouncing
+through a stone-paved street, and that dog and
+that cat hated each other and were telling each
+other so, it would sound much like it.
+
+It was well received.  Except by Ravenswood Wimble.
+He always has to have his little critical fling.
+
+"The peak of the Jungfrau!" he grumbled.
+"Jungfrau indeed!  It was Mont Blanc!  It was very
+wonderfully and subtly Mont Blanc!  But the
+Jungfrau -- never!"
+
+"Hermione," I said, "what do you think of the
+New Art?"
+
+"It's wonderful!" she breathed, "just simply
+wonderful!  So esoteric, and yet so simple!  But
+there is one thing I am going to speak to Mrs. Voke
+Easely about -- one improvement I am going to
+suggest.  His ears, you know -- don't you think they
+are too large?  Or too red, at least, for their size?
+They catch the eye too much -- they take away from
+the effect.  Before he sings here again I will have
+Mrs. Easeley bob them off a little."
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE ON SUPERFICIALITY
+
+AREN'T you just crazy about the Moral Uplift?
+
+It's coming into every department of life
+now and one just simply HAS to keep up with it in
+order to talk intelligently these days.
+
+Not that one can talk too freely about it in mixed
+company, you know.
+
+There are getting to be the awfullest lot of moral
+subjects that one can't talk about generally, aren't
+there?
+
+Eugenics and sex hygiene and all these plays and
+books with a moral purpose, you know.
+
+Of course lots of people DO talk about them
+generally.  I did myself for quite a while.  And then
+another girl and I got some books and studied up
+what the things we had been talking of really were
+and it shocked us horribly!
+
+Mamma has been trying to get me to give up the
+moral uplift entirely, but you've just simply GOT to
+talk it or be out of date.
+
+Of course the whole thing depends upon whether
+you are a serious thinker -- if you're sincere, REALLY
+sincere, you can take up anything and get good out of it.
+
+The loveliest man talked to us last night -- to our
+Little Group of Advanced Thinkers, you know.
+
+He said the curse of the age and the country was
+superficiality.  People aren't thorough, you know.
+
+I've noticed that myself and I agree with him.
+If one is going to take things up and show a serious
+interest in them one must not limit one's self to a
+few phases.
+
+One must be broad.  One must be thorough.
+One must cover the whole field of thought.
+
+Our little group this winter has been trying to
+do that.  So far we've take up Bergson, socialism,
+psychology, Rabindranath Tagore, the meaning of
+welfare work, culinary science, the new movements
+in art -- and ever so many more things I can't re-
+member now.
+
+For the rest of Lent we're going to take up the
+Cosmic Consciousness.
+
+One of the girls thought it would be a nice sort
+of thing to take up during Lent -- a quiet kind of
+thing, you know; not like feminism or chemistry.
+
+Have you seen any of the new parti-colored boots
+yet?
+
+Isn't it an absurd idea?
+
+And yet, you know -- if it made for Beauty!
+
+That is what one must always say to one's self
+must one not?  I mean: Does it make for Beauty?
+
+That's the reason I left the Suffrage Party, you
+know.  They wanted me to wear one of those hor-
+rid yellow sashes.  And my complexion can't stand
+yellow.  So I quit the Suffrage Party right there.
+
+
+
+
+ISIS, THE ASTROLOGIST
+
+WE'RE taking up astrology quiet seriously --
+our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you
+know -- and we've hired the loveliest lady
+astrologer to cast our horoscopes and give
+us a talk and get us started right.
+
+She wrote a letter to me--the most perfectly
+fascinating letter -- and I told her to call, and we
+looked her over.  She wore a beautiful sky-blue
+gown with gold stars on it -- one of those Greek
+ones, you know, like poor, dear Isadora Duncan
+wore -- and a gold star in the middle of her
+forehead.
+
+It makes her look like a unicorn, that star,"
+Ravenswood Wimble said.  But then nobody ever
+pleases Ravenswood Wimble completely.  He is
+so -- if you get me.
+
+"If a unicorn, then a celestial unicorn," Fothy
+Finch said.  Fothy is too dear for anything; he is
+always hunting for the good in people, like Apollo,
+or Euripides -- which was it? -- when they gave him
+the basket full of wheat and chaff, and he separated
+them.  Or maybe it was Diogenes.
+
+She has six sisters, and they are all astrologers,
+and they call them the Pleiades.
+
+Although Voke Easeley, in his horrid slangy way,
+said: "Pleiades?  She's a Bear!"
+
+Don't you just utterly loathe slang?
+
+Bit I was going to tell you about the lovely letter
+she wrote -- that's what attracted me to her at the
+first.
+
+"Have you never asked yourself," it began
+"'Why was I born?'"
+
+Fancy knowing that about one!  If there is one
+question I have asked myself thousands and
+thousands of times it is, "Why was I born?"
+
+And then the letter went on to talk about
+horoscopes and the Inevitable.
+
+"We may not overcome the inevitable," it said,
+"but it is ours to see that the Inevitable does not
+overcome us."
+
+Oh, the Inevitable!  The Inevitable!
+
+How often I have thought of the Inevitable with
+despair!
+
+And it has never occurred to me before that one
+could take it and use it as one pleased.  But it seems
+one can if one knows about it beforehand.  It is
+like Destiny that way.  If one is ignorant of one's
+Destiny, it comes upon one with a surprise.  But
+if one knows beforehand what one's Destiny is to
+be, one can make onself the master of it.  That is
+where the horoscope comes in handy, you know.
+
+After dipping into Astrology I will never again
+be afraid of the Inevitable.
+
+As the Letter says: "Every woman with her
+horoscope before her, and her Soul back of her,
+should be able to solve any problem and meet any
+situation that may occur in her life."
+
+Ravenswood Wimble wanted to know, when he
+met the lady -- did I tell you that her professional
+name is Isis? -- what would happen if her Soul was
+before her and her horoscope back of her.  But Isis
+just simply froze him with a look.
+
+Don't you think that levity is horrid in the midst
+of vital affairs like that?
+
+But I suppose every little group has someone in
+it that thinks he or she has to be quippy and
+facetious at times.
+
+Not but what I have a sense of humor myself.
+
+I think a sense of humor is the saving grace, if
+you get what I mean.
+
+But no one should try to use it unless he is
+perfectly sure that everyone understands he is being
+humorous.
+
+We are going to take up the sense of humor --
+our Little Group of Thinkers, you know -- in a
+serious way soon.
+
+But the Swami doesn't like Isis.  Poor, dear
+Swami!  She is a charlatan, he says.  And she
+doesn't like him.  "My dear," she said to me, "are
+you SURE he really goes into the Silences?  Or does
+he just PRETEND to?"
+
+Isn't it awful about geniuses that way -- how jealous
+they ARE of each other?  Especially psychics!
+We had two mediums the same evening a year or
+two ago who actually quarreled over which one of
+them a certain spirit control belonged to.
+
+
+
+
+THE SIMPLE HOME FESTIVALS
+
+DON'T you just love the simple old festivals,
+like Thanksgiving Day and Christmas?
+
+That's is one thing that Papa and Mamma
+and I agree about.  And this year we had a very
+simple sort of Thanksgiving Day.
+
+Of course, it's rather a bore if you have to invite
+a lot of relations.
+
+But one must always sacrifice something to gain
+the worth-while things, mustn't one?
+
+And what is more worth while than simplicity?
+
+Simplicity!  Simplicity!  Isn't it truly WONDERFUL!
+
+Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself:
+"have I been simple and genuine today?  Or have
+I FAILED?
+
+Papa always has two maiden aunts to Thanks-
+giving dinner.  Dear old souls, I suppose, but
+frumps, you know.
+
+And Fothergil Finch was there, too.  I asked
+poor dear Fothy, because otherwise he would have
+had to eat in some restaurant.
+
+I tried to be agreeable to Papa's aunts -- of
+course.  I suppose they are my great-aunts, but I
+never felt REALLY related to them -- but how could he
+know how terribly unadvanced they are?
+
+Fothy's only real interests center about Art, you
+know.  And if he had talked of Art it would have
+been better.
+
+But, as he told me later, he thought he should
+try to meet my people on their own ground and
+talk of something practical.
+
+Something with a direct bearing on life, you know.
+
+So he asked Aunt Evelyn what she thought of
+Trial Marriages.
+
+She didn't know exactly what he meant at first,
+but Aunt Fanny whispered something to her and
+she turned white and said, "Mercy!"
+
+Poor dear Fothy saw he must be on the wrong
+track, so he changed the subject and began to tell
+Aunt Fanny the plot of a new problem play.  One
+of the sex ones, you know.
+
+"Heavens," said Aunt Fanny, and began to tremble.
+
+And they drew their chairs nearer together and
+each one took a bottle of smelling salts out of a
+little black bag, and they sat and trembled and
+smelled their salts and stared at him perfectly
+fascinated.
+
+This embarrassed Fothy, but he though his mistake
+had been in talking about anything artistic,
+like a play, so he changed the subject again.  He
+told me afterward that he felt if he could get onto
+a really PRACTICAL subject all would go well.
+
+So he asked Aunt Evelyn what she thought about Genetics.
+
+"What are they?" asked Aunt Evelyn, her teeth chattering.
+
+"Why, Eugenics," said Fothy.  And then he had
+to explain all about Eugenics.
+
+They sat perfectly still and stared at him, and he
+felt sure he had them interested at last, and he
+talked on and on about Eugenics and the Future
+Race, you know, and that led him back to Trial
+Marriages, and then he go onto the Twilight Sleep.
+
+And, as he said himself afterward, what could
+be more practical?
+
+But, you know, commonplace people never
+appreciate the efforts that serious thinkers make for
+them, and Aunt Evelyn refused to come to the
+table at all when dinner was announced.  She said
+she had lost her appetite and felt faint.
+
+But Aunt Emmy came.  She asked the blessing.
+Papa always has her do that on Thanksgiving Day
+and Christmas and New Year's.  And she made a
+regular prayer out of it -- prayed for Fothy, you
+know, right before him; and prayed for me too.  It
+was awful.
+
+And afterward poor dear Fothy said he wished
+he had talked about Art.
+
+"It's safe," I said; "then people can't get
+offended, for nobody knows what you mean at all."
+
+"Oh," said Fothy, "nobody does?"  And he went
+away quite melancholy and injured.
+
+
+
+
+CITRONELLA AND STEGOMYIA
+
+WE were talking about famous love affairs
+the other evening, and Fothergil Finch
+said he was thinking of writing a ballad
+about Citronella and Stegomyia.
+
+And, of course, everybody pretended they knew
+who Citronella and Stegomyia were.  Mrs. Voke
+Easeley -- You've heard about Voke Easeley and his
+New Art, Haven't you? -- Mrs. Voke Easeley said:
+
+"But don't you think those old Italian love affairs
+have been done to death?"
+
+"Italian?" said Fothy, raising his eyebrows at
+Mrs. Voke Easeley.
+
+You know, really, there wasn't a one of them
+knew who Citronella and Stegomyia were; but they
+were all pretending, and they saw Mrs. Voke Easeley
+was in bad.  And she saw it, too, and tried to
+save herself.
+
+"Of course," she said, "Citronella and Stegomyia
+weren't Italian lovers THEMSELVES.  But so many of
+the old Italian poets have written about them that
+I always think of them as glowing stars in that
+wonderful, wonderful galaxy of Italian romance!"
+
+Fothy can be very mean when he wants to.  So he said:
+
+"I don't read Italian, Mrs. Easeley.  I have been
+forced to get all my information about Citronella
+and Stegomyia from English writers.  Maybe you
+would be good enough to tell me what Italian poet
+it is who has turned out the most recent version of
+Citronella and Stegomyia?"
+
+Mrs. Voke Easeley answered without a moment's
+hesitation: "Why, D'Annunzio, of course."
+
+That made everybody waver again.  And Aurelia
+Dart said -- she's that girl with the beautiful arms,
+you know, who plays the harp and always has a
+man or two to carry it about wherever she goes --
+somebody else's husband, if she can manage it --
+Aurelia said:
+
+"D'Annunzio, of course!  Passages of it have
+been set to music."
+
+"Won't you play some of it?" asked Fothy, very
+politely.
+
+"It has never been arranged for the harp," said
+Aurelia.  "But if Mrs. Easely can remember some
+of the lines, and will be good enough to repeat them,
+I will improvise for it."
+
+That put it up to Mrs. Easeley again, you know.
+She hates Aurelia, and Aurelia knows it.  Voke
+Easeley carried Aurelia's harp around almost all
+last winter.  And the only way Mrs. Easeley could
+break Voke of it was to bring their little girl along
+the one that has convulsions so easily, you know.
+And then when Voke was getting Aurelia's harp
+ready for her the little girl would have a convulsion,
+and Mrs. Easeley would turn her over to Voke,
+and Voke would have to take the little girl home,
+and Mrs. Easeley would stay and say what a family
+man and what a devoted husband Voke was, for an
+artist.
+
+Well, Mrs. Easeley wasn't stumped at all.  She
+got up and repeated something.  I took up Italian
+poetry one winter, and we made a special study of
+D'Annunzio; but I didn't remember what Mrs.
+Easeley recited.  But Aurelia harped to it.
+Improvising is one of the best things she does.
+
+And everybody said how lovely it was and how
+much soul there was in it, and, "Poor Stegomyia!
+Poor Citronella!"
+
+The Swami said it reminded him of some passages
+in Tagore that hadn't been translated into
+English yet.
+
+Voke Easeley said: "The plaint of Citronella is
+full of a passion of dream that only the Italian
+poets have found the language for."
+
+Fothy winked at me and I made an excuse and
+slipped into the library and looked them up -- and,
+well, would you believe it! -- they weren't lovers at
+all!  And I might have known it from the first, for
+I always use citronella for mosquitoes in the country.
+
+They were still pretending when I got back, all
+of them, and Aurelia was saying: "Citronella differs
+psychologically from Juliet -- she is more like
+poor, dear Francesca in her feeling of the cosmic
+inevitability of tragedy.  But stegomyia had a strain
+of Hamlet in him."
+
+"Yes, a strain of Hamlet," said Voke Easeley.
+"A strain of Hamlet in his nature, Aurelia -- and
+more than a strain of Tristram!"
+
+"It is a thing that Maeterlinck should have written,
+in his earlier manner," said Mrs. Voke Easeley.
+
+"The story has its Irish counterpart, too," said
+Leila Brown, who rather specializes, you know, on
+all those lovely Lady Gregory things.  "I have always
+wondered why Yeats or Synge hasn't used it."
+
+"The essential story is older than Ireland," said
+the Swami.  "It is older than Buddha.  There are
+three versions of it in Sanskrit, and the young men
+sing it to this day in Benares."
+
+Affectation!  Affectation!  Oh, how I abhor
+affectation!
+
+It was perfectly HORRID of Fothy just the same.
+
+ANYONE might have been fooled.
+
+I might have been myself, if I were not too
+intellectually honest, and Fothy hadn't tipped me
+the wink.
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE'S SALON OPENS
+
+   I
+
+Perchance last night you felt the world careen,
+Leap in its orbit like a punished pup
+Which hath a hornet on his burning bean?
+Last night, last night -- historic yestere'en! --
+Hermione's Salon was opened up!
+
+   II
+
+Without, the night was cold.  But Thought, within,
+Roared through the rooms as red and hot as Sin.
+Without, the night was calm; within, the surge
+And snap of Thought kept up a crackling din
+As if in sport the well-known Cosmic Urge
+with Psychic Slapsticks whacked the dome and Shin
+Of Swami, Serious Thinker, Ghost and Goat.
+From soup to nuts, from Nut to Super Freak,
+From clams to coffee, all the Clans were there.
+The groggy Soul Mate groping for its Twin,
+The burgling free verse Blear, the Hobo Pote,
+
+Clairvoyant, Cubist bug and Burlapped Greek,
+Souse Socialists and queens with bright green hair,
+Ginks leading barbered Art Dogs trimmed and Sleek,
+The Greenwich Stable Dwellers, Mule and Mare,
+Pal Anarchs, tamed and wrapped in evening duds,
+Philosophers who go wherever suds
+Flow free, musicians hunting after eats,
+And sandaled dames who hang from either ear
+Strange lumps -- "art jools" -- the size of pickled beets,
+Writers that write not, hunting Atmosphere,
+Painters and sculptors that ne'er paint nor sculp,
+Reformers taking notes on Brainstorm Slum,
+Cave Men in Windsor Ties, all gauche and glum,
+With strong iron jaws that crush their food to Pulp,
+And bright Boy Cynics playing paradox,
+And th' inevitable She that knitteth Belgian socks --
+A score of little groups ! -- all bees that hum
+About the futile blooms of Piffledom.
+
+   III
+
+A wan Erotic Rotter told me that
+The World could not be Saved except through Sin;
+A she eugenist, sexless, flabby, fat,
+With burst veins winding through unhealthy skin,
+With loose, uncertain lips preached Purity;
+A Preacher blasphemed just to show he dared;
+A dame praised Unconventionality
+In words her secretary had prepared;
+A bare-legg'd painter garbed in Leopard hide
+Quarreled with a Chinese lyre and scared the dogs;
+A slithering Dancer slunk from side to side
+In weird, ungodly, Oriental togs;
+A pale, anemic, frail Divinity
+Confided that she thought the great Blond Beast
+Himself was Art's own true Affinity;
+An Anarch gloomed; "The Mummy at the Feast
+Gets all the pleasure from the festive board!"
+I know not what they meant; I only wunk
+Within myself, and praised the great god Bunk.
+A Yogi sought the Silences and snored.
+
+   IV
+
+But 'twas Hermione that Got the Hand!
+Ah, yes, she talked!  Of Purpose, and of Soul,
+And how Life's parts are equal to its Whole.
+And Thought -- and do the Masses Understand?
+She lightly touched on Life and Love and Death,
+And Cosmic Consciousness, and on Unrest,
+Substance and Shadow, Solid Things and Breath,
+The New Art movements her sweet voice caressed,
+Philanthropy, Genetics, Social Duty,
+The Mother-Teacher claimed a passing smile,
+And she made clear we all must worship Beauty
+And Concentrate on Things that are Worth While.
+"Each night," she said, "each night ere I retire
+Into the Depths I peer, and I inquire,
+"Have I today some Worth-while Summit scaled?
+Or have I failed to climb?  Oh, have I failed?
+These little talks between the Self and Soul --
+Oh, don't you think? -- still help us toward the Goal;
+They help us shape the Universal Laws
+In sweet accordance with our glorious Cause!"
+"Hermione," said I, "they do! They do!"
+"Thank you," said she, "I KNEW you'd understand!"
+I said to her, the while I pressed her hand,
+"All, all, my interest I owe to you!"
+
+And then I left, and following my feet
+Soon found that they had led me to the street.
+
+   V
+
+And there I found a burly Garbage Man
+Who through bleak winter nights from can to can
+Goes on his ashy way, sans rest or pause,
+Goes on his way, still faithful to his Cause.
+
+"Tell me," said I, "if now across the verge
+Of night should come the kindly Cosmic Urge,
+Strong-armed and virile, full of vim and help,
+And offer you with thee here cans to help,
+Would you accept the Cosmic Urge's aid,
+Or would you rise up free and unafraid
+And say, 'My restless Personality
+Bids me return a negative to thee!'"
+
+"Old scout," says he, "I've never really brought
+My intellects to bear on that there though!
+I gets no help, I asks no help from none --
+But I have noticed, bo, that one by one,
+And soon or late, and gradual, day by day,
+Most things in life eventual comes my way!
+Into the Ashes Can the whole world goes,
+Old hats, old papers, toys and styles and clo'es,
+Eventual they dump "em down the bay!"
+
+   VI
+
+Symbolic Garbage Man! Sans rest or pause,
+In steadfast faith work for thy Sacred Cause!
+Some time, perhaps, all piles of twisted bunk,
+All half-baked faddists, heaps of mental junk,
+Unto the waiting Scow we'll cart away
+Eventual to dump 'em down the bay!
+
+
+
+
+THE PERFUME CONCERT
+
+THE Loveliest man gave us a talk the other
+evening -- our Little Group of Serious
+Thinkers, you know -- on the Art of the
+Future.
+
+And what do you think it is to be?  You'd never
+guess!  Never!
+
+The entertainment of the future will be a
+Perfume concert!
+
+Every scent, if you get what I mean, corresponds
+to some color, and ever color corresponds to some
+sound, and every sound corresponds to some
+emotion.
+
+And the truly esthetic person -- the one who is
+Sensitized, if you get what I mean -- will hear a
+tone on the violin, and see a color, and think
+passionately of the One he Loves, all at the same
+time, just through smelling a Rose.
+
+Only, of course, it must be the RIGHT KIND of a rose.
+
+Papa -- poor der Papa is so coarse and crude
+sometimes in his attempts to be witty -- Papa says it
+would be a fine idea to lead the man who talked to
+us into a boiled cabbage foundry and then watch
+him die of the noise.  Papa is not Sensitized; he
+doesn't understand that the esthete really WOULD die --
+Papa resists the vibrations of the esthetic environment
+with which I have striven to surround him,
+if you get what I mean.
+
+Oh, to be Sensitized!  To be Sensitized!  To vibrate
+like a reed in the wind!  To thrill like a petal
+in the sun!
+
+I'm having a study of my aura made.  You
+know, one's soul gives off certain colors, and if
+one's individuality is to be in tune with the Cosmic
+All, one must take care that the colors about out
+do not jar with one's own Psychic Hue.
+
+And after one has found one's soul color, one can
+find the scent to match that color, if you get what I
+mean.
+
+I am going to have the house re-decorated, with
+a sweet subtle blending of perfumes in every room!
+
+I have always been good at matching things,
+anyhow -- I perceive affinities at a glance.  Psychic
+people do.
+
+When I was quite a small child Mamma always
+used to take me with her to the shops if there were
+ribbons or anything like that to be matched.
+
+I just loved it, even as a baby!  And I think
+it is the greatest fun yet.
+
+Often I go through half a dozen shops, not because
+I want to buy anything, but just to match colors,
+you know.  It gives me a thrill that nothing else does.
+
+Some of us are like that -- some of us truly Sensitized
+Souls -- we function, I mean, quite without
+being able to stop it -- I hope you follow me.  Isn't
+it wonderful to be in touch with the Universe in
+that way!  Not, of course, that the shop girls who
+show you the fabrics and things are always understanding.
+
+The working classes are so often ungrateful to
+us advanced thinkers.  Sometimes I am almost provoked
+to the point of giving up my Social Betterment work
+when I think HOW ungrateful they are.
+But some of us, in every age, must suffer at the
+hands of the masses for the sake of the masses, if
+you know what I mean.
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING OTHER-WORLDLY
+
+IT is not enough to be merely unworldly.
+
+One must be OTHER-WORLDLY  as well, if you
+get what I mean.
+
+For what does all Modern Thought amount
+to if it does not minister to the Beautiful and the
+Spiritual?
+
+Isn't Materialism simply FRIGHTFUL?
+
+For the undisciplined mind, I mean.  Of course,
+the right sort of mind will get good even out of
+Materialism, and the wrong sort will get harm out
+of it.
+
+Every time before I take up anything new I ask
+myself, "Is it OTHER-worldly?  Or is it not OTHER-Worldly?''
+
+We were going to take up Malthusianism and
+Mendelism -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
+you know -- and give a whole evening to them, but
+one of the girls said, "Oh let's NOT take them up.
+They sound frightfully chemical, somehow!"
+
+I said, "The question, my dear, is not whether
+they are chemical or un-chemical.  The question is,
+Are they worldly?  Or are they OTHER-Worldly?"
+
+That is the Touchstone.  One can apply it to
+everything, simply EVERYTHING!"
+
+Should teachers be mothers, for instance -- that
+question came up for discussion the other evening.
+And I settled the whole matter at once, with one
+question: "Is it worldly?  Or is it OTHER-worldly
+for Teachers to be Mothers?  Or is it merely Un-Worldly?"
+
+Have you seen the latest models?  Some of them
+are wonderful, simply WONDERFUL!  You know I
+always dress to my temperament -- and I'm having
+the loveliest gown made -- the skirt is ecru lace, you
+know; a double tiered effect, falling from a straight
+bodice, and the color scheme is silver and blue.
+
+
+
+
+PARENTS AND THEIR INFLUENCE
+
+MAMA is unadvanced enough, goodness
+knows.
+
+But poor, dear Papa!
+
+"Papa," I said to him the other day, " all conservatives
+worth listening to were radicals in their
+youth."  The loveliest man told us that the other
+night -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you
+know -- and it struck me as being profound.
+
+And isn't profundity fascinating?
+
+But Papa only glowered and said, "Umph!"
+
+Papa, you know, is an obstructionist.
+
+"Papa," I said to him, "what is stubbornness in
+you has become will power in me.  You will never
+dominate me -- NEVER!  You should study heredity;
+it's wonderful, simply WONDERFUL!
+
+Papa scowled and said, "Umph!"
+
+But you know, Parents are Doomed.
+
+Our little group listened to a talk the other evening
+about Parents.  Mothers, particularly.
+
+"The menace of the Mother," it was called.  I
+always make note of titles.
+
+This man said -- he was a regular savant -- I wish
+you could have heard him -- my, if I weren't such
+an advanced thinker, I would be a savant ----
+
+Anyhow, he said, this savant, that Mothers held
+back Civilization through Selfishness -- they teach
+the Child, you know, that is -- er, well, you know,
+they lose sight of Ulterior Ethics and Race Morality
+while inculcating Individual Self-Improvement.
+
+It's frightful to think about, isn't it?  Simply FRIGHTFUL!
+
+Then and there I resolved that if I were ever a Mother
+I would turn over the up-bringing of my children to experts
+and savants and specialists like that.
+
+"Papa," I said, "you allowed poor, dear Mamma
+to make me selfish -- you know you did!  What
+have you to say for yourself?  What right had you
+to make me a Self-Indulgent Individualist?
+
+And, you know, I have struggled and struggled
+to get rid of the selfishness my parents trained into
+me.  How I strive for Harmony and Humility!
+Nearly every night before I go to bed I say to my-
+self: "Have I been HUMBLE today?  Truly humble?
+Or have I FAILED?"
+
+Children are not nearly SIMPLE enough these days.
+
+Oh, for more Simplicity!  That is what we all need.
+
+Though I will say this for Mamma -- that it
+would have been hard to train Simplicity into me
+even if she had known how.
+
+I had such a high-strung, sensitive, nervous organism
+as a child, you know.
+
+At a very early age my temperament began to show.
+
+And one CANNOT hide one's temperament.
+
+Especially if one is at all psychic, and I am, VERY.
+
+But if I ever have Children -- well, I will take no
+chances with them.
+
+To begin with, I will Select their Father.
+
+Mamma said, when I told her that: "Hermione,
+you are HORRID!"
+
+Poor dear Mamma!  She's SO stupid!  "Mamma,"
+I said to her, of course I DON'T mean free love.
+I'm not that advanced, I hope!  Though some VERY
+Nice People have written of it -- it's quite respectable,
+as a theory.  But you're hopelessly old-fashioned.
+I WILL select the parent of my Off-spring;
+YOU were selected."
+
+Mamma only groaned and said: "Anything but
+a Cave-man, Hermione."
+
+But I am not sure.  It comes back to me again
+and again how Primitive I am in some ways.
+
+And to wander barefoot in the dew!
+
+Not really quite barefoot, of course -- but with
+some of the new sandals on.
+
+
+
+
+FOTHERGIL FINCH TELLS OF HIS REVOLT
+AGAINST ORGANIZED SOCIETY
+
+BERTIE GRIGGS -- you know Ethelbert
+Griggs, don't you?  He does the text for
+the Paris fashions for a woman's magazine,
+and on the side he writes the most impassioned
+verse.  All about Serpents and Woman, and Lillith
+and Phryne, you know.
+
+Bertie said to me only the other day, "Fothy, you
+are too Radical.  It will keep you down in the
+world."
+
+"Bertie," I said, "I know I am, but can I help
+it?  I spurn the world!  A truly virile poet must."
+
+"Some day, Fothy," he said, "you will come into
+contact with the law."
+
+I only laughed.  Bitterly, I suppose, for Bertie
+looked at me quite shocked.
+
+"Bertie," I said, "I expect persecution.  I welcome
+it.  All great souls do.  I look for it.  On
+one pretext or another, I will be flung into prison
+when my next volume, "Clamor, Cries and Curses'
+comes out."
+
+And I will, too, if I ever find a publisher who
+dares to bring it out.  But they are all too cowardly!
+
+"Fothy," he said, "you Revolutionists are always
+talking -- but what do you ever do?
+
+I arose with dignity.  "Bertie," I said, "I am
+ready to suffer for the Cause."  I turned and left
+him.  I must have been pale with resolve, for he
+ran after me and caught me by the wrist.  But I
+shook him off.
+
+I was in a desperate mood.
+
+"Curses upon all their Conventions!" I said, as I
+turned up the street toward Central Park.  "Curses
+upon all organized society!"
+
+I stopped in front of Columbus's statue, at
+Columbus Circle.
+
+"Fool," I muttered bitterly, "to discover a new
+world"
+
+I shook my fist at the statue and went on.
+
+I wandered over to the place where they keep
+the animals, and stopped in front of one of the
+monkey cages.
+
+Dear, unconventional little beasts!  They always
+charm my blacker moods away from me!  So free,
+so untrammeled, so primitive!
+
+I smiled at a monkey.  He smiled at me.  I held
+up a peanut.  He reached out his hand for it.
+
+I was about to fling it to him when I saw a sign
+that read:
+
+"Visitors are warned not to feed the animals
+under the penalty of the law."
+
+Always their laws!  Always their restrictions!
+Always their damnable shackles!  Always this
+denial of the rights of the individual!
+
+For a moment I stood there with the peanut in
+my hand just simply too angry for anything!
+
+And then I cried out, quite loudly: "Curses upon
+organized society!  I will break its laws!  I will
+feed the animals!"
+
+Always in times of great crisis I see myself quite
+plainly as if I were some other person; poets often
+do, you know; and I could not help thinking of the
+pose of Ajax defying the lightning.
+
+"I WILL break the law!" I cried.  "So there!"
+
+And with that I flung the peanut right into the
+cage with all my might, and ran away, laughing
+mockingly as I ran.
+
+I felt that I had crossed the Rubicon, and that
+night I sat down and wrote my revolutionary poem,
+"The Defiance."
+
+What the Cause needs is men with Vision to see
+and Courage to perform!  This is the age of Virility!
+
+
+
+
+THE EXOTIC AND THE UNEMPLOYED
+
+WE'VE been taking up the Exotic this week
+in poetry and painting, you know, and
+all that sort of thing -- and its influence
+on our civilization.
+
+Really, it's wonderful -- simply WONDERFUL!  Quite
+different from the Erotic, you know, and from the
+Esoteric, too -- though they'll all mixed up with it
+sometimes.
+
+Odd, isn't it, how all these new movements seem
+to be connected with one another?
+
+One of the chief differences between the Exotic in
+art and other things -- such as the Esoteric, for
+instance -- is that nearly everything Exotic seems to
+have crept into our art from abroad.
+
+Don't you think some of those foreign ideas are
+apt to be -- well, dangerous?  That is, to the
+untrained mind?
+
+You can carry them too far, you know -- and if
+you do they work into your subconsciousness.
+
+One of the girls -- she belongs to the same Little
+Group of Advanced Thinkers that I do -- has been so
+taken with the Exotic that she wears orchids all the
+time and just simply CRAVES Chinese food.  "My
+love," she said to me only yesterday, "I feel that I
+must have chop suey or I'll DIE!  The Exotic has
+worked into her subliminal being, you know.
+
+She has an intense and passionate nature, and
+I'm sure I don't know what would become of her
+if it were not for the spiritual discipline she gets
+out of modern thought.
+
+Next week we're taking up Syndicalism -- it's
+frightfully interesting, they say, and awfully
+advanced.
+
+I suppose it's a new kind of philosophy or socialism,
+or maybe anarchy -- or something like that.
+[Most of these new things that come along nowadays
+ARE something like that, aren't they.
+
+I'm sure the world owes a debt to its advanced
+thinking which it can never repay for always
+keeping abreast of topics like that.
+
+Not that I've lost my interest in any of the older
+forms of sociology, you know, just because I am
+keeping up with the newer phases of it.
+
+Only yesterday I rode about town in the car and
+had the chauffeur stop a while every place where
+they were shoveling snow.
+
+The nicest man was with me -- he is connected
+with a settlement, and has given his life to sociology
+and all that sort of thing.
+
+"Just think," I said to him, "how much real practical
+sociology we have right here before us -- all
+these men shoveling snow -- and how little they realize,
+most of them, that their work is taking them
+into sociology at all."
+
+He didn't say anything, but he seemed impressed.
+
+And I'm not sure the unemployed should be grateful
+to the serious thinkers for the careful study we
+give them.  Don't you think so?
+
+
+
+
+SOULS AND TOES
+
+I went to a Soul Fight at Hermione's
+
+And nothing normal can describe it . . .
+
+It was beyond rhyme, reason, rum, rhubarb or rhythm . . .
+
+Therefore, Vers Libre Muse, help me!
+
+Imagist outcast with the bleary eyes,
+
+My psychic Pup, my polyrhythmic hound, lift up
+   Your voice and help me howl!
+
+Tenth Muse, doggerel muse, slink hither, brute,
+
+And lick your master's hand . . . I've need of
+   Thee . . .
+
+Come catercornered on three legs with doubtful tail
+   And eager eyes . . .
+
+Tomorrow I may bash you in the ribald ribs again
+
+And publicly disown you;
+
+But oh! Today I've need of thee . . .
+
+Winged mongrel, mutt divine, come here and help
+   Me bay the piebald moon!
+
+
+
+It was a Soul Fight at Hermione's . . .
+
+A fat Terpsichore with polished toes . . . a barefoot she Soul
+
+With ten Achaian toes . . . and each toe had a separate soul, she said . . .
+
+Was there . . . not only there, but IT.
+
+She sat upon a couch and lectured . . . not with words,
+
+But with her toes, her eloquent, her temperamental toes . . .
+
+Her topes that had trod (so she said) the paths of beauty
+
+Since Hector was a pup at Troy . . .
+
+She sat upon a couch . . . bards, swamis and Hermione,
+
+Gilt souls and purple, melomaniacs, yellow souls
+   And blue,
+
+Souse socialists and other cognac-scented cognoscenti,
+
+Post-cubist chicles that would ne'er jell into gum . . .
+
+All, all the little groups from all the brainstorm Slums . . .
+
+Why specify? . . . we know our little groups!
+   . . . where there . . .
+
+Were there to worship at those feet . . . to vibrate
+    and change color with the moods of those unusual feet. . . .
+
+"This toe," she said, "is Beauty . . . this is Art . . .
+
+This toe is Italy, and this is Greece." . . .
+
+A poet, quite beside himself with inspiration,
+
+Suddenly arose and cried:
+   "This little pig went to market,
+      This little pig stayed home
+   This little pig was Greece,
+      This little pig was Rome!"
+
+But they chilled him . . . he went Into the Silences . . .
+
+And Terpischore resumed:
+
+"My ten toes are: Beauty, Art, Italy, Greece,
+   Life, Music, Psyche, Color, Motion, Liberty!
+Put yourself into a receptive attitude now, and
+   Beauty will speak to you!"
+And while a satellite ran rosy fingers down a lute,
+   she moved the toe named Beauty to and fro . . .
+
+A hush fell on the assembled nuts, as Beauty moved . . .
+As Beauty spoke to them . . .
+"I see," murmured Hermione to Fothergil Finch,
+   "I see,
+As that toe moves . . . the Isles of Greece . . .
+   And Aphrodite rising
+From the Acropolis." . . . "You mean," said Fothergil, "from the Aegean!"
+"It is all one," said Hermione, "the point is that
+   I see her rising!"
+
+Then Color spoke to them . . .
+"As that toe moves," said Ravenswood Wimble, "I
+   see the heavens
+Turned into one vast Kaleidoscope . . . all the stars
+   and moons
+Dance through my soul like flakes of colored glass!"
+Then waved the toe called Life, and as with one
+   accord each of the company
+Leapt gasping to his or her feet, as the case might be,
+And cried: "I feel!  I feel!  I feel!  I feel the Cosmic Urge!"
+
+Then moved the toe called Italy,
+And Fothergil Finch remarked: "Roses . . .
+   roses . . . roses . . .
+Onions and roses . . . roses are onions, and onions pigs . . .
+And pigs are beautiful" . . .
+And then the serious thinkers cried as one:
+"Ah!  Pigs are Beautiful!"
+"Ah, Italy; oh, Italy!" cried Fothy Finch,
+"Oh, never cease to move . . . Italy . . .
+garlic . . . Venice . . .
+Oh, bind my brows with garlic, lovely land, and
+   turn me loose!"
+And as the toe called Italy still moved
+The little groups made it into a chant, and sang:
+"Oh, bind my brows with garlic, love, and turn me loose!"
+
+                  * * *
+
+"Hermione," I asked her afterward,
+"Did you really see and feel anything when those
+   educated toes wiggled?"
+"How can you ask?" she said, very up-stagey.
+"Hermione," I said, "we are old enough friends by
+   this time, so we can deal frankly with one
+   another.  Tell me on the square . . . did you
+   get it?"
+"You are blaspheming at the shrink of Art!" she said.
+"Hermione!  You are dodging!"
+"Did you notice," she said irrelevantly, "the nail
+   polish she was using?
+"It's QUITE the latest thing!  For finger nails, too,
+   you know.  That delicate rose pink, with just
+   the touch of creaminess in it!  It's the creamy
+   tint that's new, you know.  Isn't it simply
+   wonderful?"
+
+
+
+
+KULTUR, AND THINGS
+
+Do you know, Kultur isn't the same thing at
+all as culture . . . FANCY!
+
+When we took it up -- Kultur, I mean yes, --
+we took it up in quite a serious way the other
+evening -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you
+know -- and threshed it out thoroughly -- we hadn't
+the slightest idea that it would lead us straight to
+Nietzsche and -- and, well, all those people like that,
+if you get what I mean.  Though, of course, as the
+man who spoke to us -- he was the LOVELIEST person!
+ -- spoke in German, we may have missed some of
+the finer shades.
+
+Oh, yes, I had German in high school . . . really,
+I was quite proficient . . . although, of course,
+it's such a GUTTURAL kind of language -- don't you
+think? -- that one wonders how they EVER sing it.
+And then, the verbs! . . . but I had Latin verbs
+about the same time, you know . . . and really,
+isn't it surprising how some of those foreign languages
+seem to RUN to verbs, if you get what I mean?
+
+It seems it was the Germans who invented the
+Superman . . . and I suppose we must be grateful
+to them for that, no matter what they may have
+done with him after they invented him. . . .
+
+I used to be quite taken with the Superman, you
+know. . . . Really, I didn't recognize how
+dangerous he might become. . . .
+
+I didn't know he was German at all when we
+took him up. . . .
+
+Have you read anything about the Blond Beast?
+
+I felt rather attracted toward him for a long
+time myself . . . until lately. . . . But the attraction
+passed. . . . I'm not brunette, you know, at
+all. . . . Likely that's why I lost interest in
+him. . . .
+
+Aren't affinities between people of different
+complexion simply WONDERFUL!
+
+It makes me wonder if the Eugenists can be right
+after all!
+
+Fothergil Finch says that's where the Eugenists
+fall down. . . . He says they don't take account
+of Affinities at all.
+
+Sometimes one finds it very puzzling -- doesn't
+one? -- the way these modern causes and movements
+seem to contradict one another!
+
+But if one is in tune with the Cosmic All these
+little inconsistencies don't matter.
+
+The Cosmic All! . . . WHAT would we do without it?
+
+How do you suppose people ever got along a
+generation or two ago before the Cosmos and all
+that sort of thing was discovered?
+
+I've often thought about it . . . and of what life
+must have been like in those days!  As Emerson
+. . . or WAS it Emerson? . . . says in one of his
+poems: "Better a year of Europe than a cycle of
+Cathay!"
+
+That's what Fothy Finch says he always feels
+about Brooklyn . . . though I WILL say this for
+Brooklyn -- the first girl I saw with courage enough
+to wear one of those ankle watches on the street
+lived in Brooklyn.
+
+But don't you think Brooklyn people are rather
+LIKE that . . . go to the latest things in dress, you
+know, in an EXTREME sort of way, so that people
+won't suspect they live in Brooklyn?
+
+
+
+
+THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
+
+ISN'T the Christmas festival just simply WONDERFUL?
+
+For days beforehand I feel so uplifted -- so
+well, OTHER-WORLDLY -- if you know what I mean.
+
+Isn't it just dreadful that any MATERIAL
+considerations have to spoil such a sacred time?
+
+It does seem to me that somehow we might free
+ourselves of WORLDLINESS and GREEDINESS and just
+rise to the spiritual significance of the day.  If only
+we could!
+
+And what a blessing it would be to the poor, tired
+shop girls if we could!
+
+Though, of course, they, the shop girls, I mean,
+must be upheld even in their weariest moments by
+the thought that they are helping on the beautiful
+impulse of giving!
+
+When they reflect that every article they sell is
+to be a gift from one thoughtful and loving heart
+to another they must forget the mere fatigue of the
+flesh and just feel the stimulus, the inspiration, the
+vibration!
+
+There are gifts, I admit, that haven't the divine
+spark of love to hallow them, but after all there
+aren't so many of that sort.  Love one another is
+the spirit of Christmas -- and it prevails, whatever
+the skeptics say to the contrary.  And though
+it's a pity there has to be a MATERIAL side to
+Christmas at all, it's so comforting, so ennobling
+to realize that back of the material gifts is Brotherly
+Love.
+
+It quite reassures one about the state of the world;
+it certainly isn't getting worse with Brotherly Love
+and the Spirit of Giving animating everybody.
+
+Of course, Christmas giving IS a problem sometimes.
+It is SO embarrassing when somebody you'd
+forgotten entirely sends you a present.
+
+I always buy several extra things just for that
+emergency.  Then, when an unexpected gift arrives,
+I can rush off a return gift so promptly that
+nobody'd ever DREAM I hadn't meant to send it all
+along.
+
+And I always buy things I'd like to have myself,
+so that if they aren't needed for unexpected people
+they're still not wasted.
+
+With all my spirituality, I have a practical side,
+you see.
+
+All well BALANCED natures have both the spiritual
+and the practical side.  It's so essential, nowadays,
+to be well balanced, and it's a great relief to me to
+find I CAN be practical.  It saves me a lot of trouble,
+too, especially about this problem of Christmas giving.
+
+I know the value of material things, for instance.
+And I never waste money giving more expensive
+presents to my friends than I receive from them.
+That's one of the advantages of having a well
+balanced nature, a PRACTICAL side.
+
+And, anyway, the value of a gift is not in the
+COST of it.  Quite cheap things, when they represent
+true thought and affection, are above rubies.
+
+Mamma and Papa are going to get me a pearl
+necklace, just to circle the throat, but beautifully
+matched pearl.  I wouldn't care for an
+ostentatiously long string of pearls anyway.
+
+Poor, dear Papa says he really can't afford it --
+with times so hard, and those dear, pathetic
+Europeans on everybody's hands, you know -- but
+Mamma made him understand how necessary BEAUTY is
+to me, and he finally gave in.
+
+Isn't it just WONDERFUL how love rules us all at
+Christmas time?
+
+
+
+
+
+POOR DEAR MAMA AND FOTHERGIL FINCH
+           (Hermione's Boswell Loquitur)
+
+HERMIONE'S mother, who has figured so
+often as "Poor dear Mama" in these
+pages, has come out definitely for Suffrage.
+
+Someone told her that there was an alliance between
+the liquor interests and the anti-Suffagists and she
+believed it, and it shocked her.
+
+Since the activities of her daughter have brought
+her into contact with Modern Though her life has
+been chiefly passed in one or another of three
+phases: She has been shocked, she is being
+shocked, or she fears that she is about to be shocked.
+
+She is nearing fifty and rather stout, though her
+figure is still not bad.  She has an abundance of
+chestnut hair, all her own, and naturally wave; her
+hands are pretty, her feet are pretty, her face is pretty.
+Her mouth is very small, almost disproportionately so,
+and her eyes are very large and blue and very wide
+open.  She was intended for a placed
+woman, but Hermione and Modern Thought
+have made complete placidity impossible.  She has
+a fondness for rich brocades and pretty fans are
+chocolate candy and big bowls of roses and comfortable
+chairs.  When she was Hermione's age
+she used to do water color sketches; the outlines
+were penciled in by her drawing teacher, and she
+washed on the color very smoothly and neatly; but
+she heard a great many stories concerning the
+dissolute lives that artists lead and she gave it up.
+Nevertheless, she sometimes says: "Hermione
+comes by her interest in Art quite naturally."
+
+Fothergil Finch and I called recently.  Hermione
+was not in, and her mother suggested that we wait
+for her.  Hermione's mother looks upon all of
+Hermione's friends with more or less suspicion,
+and she would not permit Fothergil in particular to
+be about the place for a moment if she were not
+obliged to; but she does not have the requisite stern-
+ness of character to resist her daughter.  Fothergil,
+knowing that he is not approved of, scarcely does
+himself justice when Hermione's mother is present;
+although he endeavors to avoid offending her.
+
+"Have you seen the play, 'Young America'?"
+asked Fothergil, searching for a safe topic of
+conversation.
+
+A little ripple of alarm immediately ruffled the
+lakeblue innocence of her eyes.
+
+"If it is a Problem Play, I have not," she said,
+"I consider such things dangerous."
+
+"But it isn't, you know," said Fothergil eagerly.
+It's a --  a -- it's a perfectly NICE play.
+It's about a dog!"
+
+"About a dog!"  Her eyebrows went up, and her
+mouth rounded itself with the conviction that no
+perfectly nice play could possibly be about a dog.
+"I think that is dreadfully Coarse!" she said.
+
+"But it isn't," protested Fothergil.  "It's just the
+SORT of thing you'd like."
+
+"Indeed!"  She felt slightly insulted at his assumption
+of what she would like, and dismissed
+the subject with a wave of her pretty hand.  Fothergil
+tried again.
+
+"I hope," he said ingratiatingly, "that you haven't
+been bothered by mosquitoes."  She looked
+a bit frightened, but said nothing, and he dashed on
+determinedly.  "You know, this is a new variety
+of mosquitoes we've been having this year.  Most
+of them have stripes on their legs, you know, but
+these have black legs this year.  But maybe you
+haven't noticed -- -- "
+
+He stopped in midcareer.  The preposterous idea
+that she could be interested in examining the legs
+of mosquitoes had too evidently outraged Hermione's
+mother.  Fothergil, flushed and embarrassed, tried
+to make it better and made it worse.
+
+"Maybe you haven't noticed their -- er -- limbs,"
+said Fothergil.
+
+"I have not," she murmured.
+
+Fothergil desperately persevered.
+
+"We don't see so much as we used to of --
+of -- -- "  (I am sure he didn't know he was
+going to finish the sentence when he began it, but
+he plunged ahead) -- "of the Queen Anne style of
+architecture."
+
+With visible relief, and yet with a lurking suspicion,
+she assented.  And Fothergil, feeling himself
+on safe ground at last, went on:
+
+"Don't you think she was one of the most interesting
+queens in English history -- Queen Anne?
+Do you remember the anecdote -- -- ?
+
+But she checked him, frightened again:
+
+"I do not wish to hear it, Mr. Finch," she said.
+
+"But," said Fothergil, "She was a most unexceptional
+Queen -- not like, er -- not like -- well,
+Cleopatra, you know, or any of those bad ones."
+
+Hermione's mother was silent, but it was apparent
+that she feared the talk was about to veer toward
+Cleopatra.
+
+"When I was a girl," she said, "the lives of
+queens were considered rather dangerous reading
+for young women.  You need not go into details,
+please."
+
+I couldn't stand it any more myself. "If you'll
+just tell Hermione I called," I said, edging toward
+the door.  Fothergil, however, stuck it out.  In the
+frenzy of embarrassment he must have lost his
+head completely.  For as I left I heard him be-
+ginning:
+
+"Did you read the story in the papers today of
+the man who killed his wife?  Crimes of passion are
+becoming more and more frequent. . . ."
+
+
+
+
+PRISON REFORM AND POISE
+
+AREN'T you just crazy about prison reform?
+
+The most wonderful man talked to us -- to
+our Little Group of Advanced Thinkers, you
+know -- about it the other evening.
+
+It made me feel that I'd be willing to do anything,
+simply ANYTHING! -- to help those poor, unfortunate
+convicts.  Collect money, you know, or give talks,
+or read books about them, or make any other
+sacrifice.
+
+Even get them jobs.  One ought to help them to
+start over again, you know.
+
+Though as for hiring one of them myself, or
+rather getting Papa to -- well, really, you know,
+one must draw the line somewhere!
+
+But it's a perfectly fascinating subject to take up,
+prison reform is.
+
+It gives one such a sense of brotherhood -- and of
+service -- it's so broadening, don't you think? --
+taking up things like that?
+
+And one must be broad.  I ask myself every night
+before I go to bed: "Have I been BROAD today?
+Or have I failed?"
+
+Though, of course, one can be TOO broad, don't you think?
+
+What I mean is, one must not be so broad that
+one loses one's poise in the midst of things.
+
+Poise!  That is what this age needs!
+
+I suppose you've heard wide-brimmed hats are
+coming in again?
+
+
+
+
+AN EXAMPLE OF PSYCHIC POWER
+
+HAVE you thought deeply concerning the
+Persistence of Personal Identity?
+
+We took it up the other evening -- our
+little group, you know -- in quite a thorough way --
+devoted an entire evening to it.
+
+You see, there's a theory that after Evolution has
+evolved just as far as it possibly can, everything
+will go to smash, but then Evolution will start all
+over again. And everything that has happened be-
+fore will happen again.
+
+Only the question is whether the people to whom
+it is happening again will know whether they
+are the same people to whom it has happened
+before.
+
+That's where the question of Persistence of
+Personal Identity comes in. FRIGHTFULLY
+fascinating, isn't it?
+
+For my part I'd just as soon not be reincarnated
+as to be reincarnated and not know anything about
+it, wouldn't you?
+
+Of course, one's Subliminal Consciousness might
+know about it, and give one intimations.
+
+I've had intimations like that myself -- really!
+
+I'm dreadfully psychic, you know.
+
+Sometimes I quite startle people with my psychic
+power.
+
+Fothergil Finch was here the other evening --
+you know fothergil Finch, the poet, don't you? --
+and I astounded him utterly by reading his inmost
+thoughts.
+
+He had just finished reading one of his poems --
+a vers libre poem, you know; all about Strength and
+Virility, and that sort of thing.  Fothergil is just
+simply fascinated by Strength and Virility, though
+you never would think it to look at him -- he is so --
+so -- well, if you get what I mean you'd think to
+look at him that he'd be writing about violets instead
+of cave men.
+
+"Fothy," I said, when he had finished reading
+the poem, "I know what you are thinking -- what
+you are feeling!"
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+"You're thinking," I said, 'how WONDERFUL a
+thing is the Cosmic Urge!"
+
+Thoughts come to me just like that -- leap to me --
+right out of nowhere, so to speak.
+
+Fothy was staggered; he actually turned pale;
+for a minute or two he could scarcely speak.  There
+had been scarcely a WORD about Cosmic Urge in
+the poem, you know; he'd hardly mentioned it.
+
+"It is wonderful," he said, when we got over the
+shock; "wonderful to be understood!"  And you
+know, really -- poor dear! -- so many people don't
+understand Fothy at all.  Nor what he writes,
+either.
+
+But the strangest thing was -- I wish I could make
+you understand how positively EERIE it makes me
+feel -- that just the instant before he said, "It is
+wonderful to be understood!"  I knew he was going
+to say it.  I got that psychically, too!
+
+"Fothy," I said, "It is absolutely WEIRD -- I
+eavesdropped on your brain the second time!"
+
+"Wonderful!" he said, "but the still more
+wonderful thing would be -- -- "
+
+And before he could finish the sentence it happened
+the THIRD time!  I interrupted and finished it
+for him.
+
+"The still more wonderful thing would be," I said,
+"if it were NOT so."
+
+"Heavens!" he cried, "this is getting positively ghostly."
+
+And you know, it almost was.  Not that I'm superstitious
+at all, you know, in the vulgar way.  But in the dim
+room -- I always have just candlelight in
+the drawing-room -- it fits in with my more reflective
+moods, somehow -- I believe one must suit one's
+environment to one's mood, don't you? -- in the dim
+room, all those thoughts flying back and forty between
+my brain and his gave me a positively creepy
+feeling.  And Fothy was so shaken I had to give
+him a drink of Papa's Scotch before he went out
+into the night.
+
+
+
+
+SOME BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS
+
+(Fothergil Finch, the Vers Libre Bard)
+
+
+OH, the Beautiful Mud!  I always leave it on
+my boots.  It is sacred to me.  Because in
+it are the souls of lilies!
+
+The Hog should be a sacred beast.  Hogs are
+Beautiful!  They are close to the Mire!  Oh, to be
+a Swine!
+
+What is more eloquent than a Sneeze?  The
+Sneeze is the protest of the Free Spirit against the
+Smug Citizen who never exposes himself to a cold.
+Oh, Beautiful Sneezes!  Oh, to make my life one
+loud explosive Sneeze in the face of Conventionality!
+
+What is so free, so untrammeled, so ungyved, so
+unconventional, as an Influenza Germ?  From
+throat to throat it floats, full of the spirit of true
+democratic brotherhood, making the masses equal
+with the classes, careless, winged ungyved!  Oh,
+the Beautiful Germ!  Oh, to be an Influenza Germ!
+
+What is so naive as a Hiccough!  Oh, to be ingenuous,
+unspoiled, beautiful, barbaric!  Oh, the
+hiccoughs, the beautiful hiccoughs, the hiccoughs
+of Art uttered against the hurricane of time.
+
+Bugs are Beautiful!  Oh, the beautiful, sleek
+slithery bugs.  Oh, to be a water-bug of poesy skipping
+across the flood of oblivion!  Oh, to be a Bug!
+
+I went down to the waterfront where they sell
+fish and there I saw a fisherman who had caught a
+Dogfish, and he cursed, but I said to him, "Do not
+curse the Dogfish!  The Dogfish is Symbolical!  The
+Dogfish is beautiful!  Beautiful!"
+
+Oh, the lovely Garbage Scows!  I went down the
+bay, and there I saw them dump the Garbage Scows!
+I said to the man who sailed my boat: "What does
+the Garbage Scow MEAN to you?"  He was a
+Philistine; he was Bourgeois; he was Smug; he was
+Conventional, and he said: "A Garbage Scow means a
+Garbage Scow to me!"  But I said to him: "You
+are Academic; you are Conservative!  Garbage
+Scows are lovely Symbols!  Oh, my Argosies of
+Dream!  Oh, my beautiful Garbage Scows!  Some
+day even the Philistines of Benighted America will
+see the Spiritual Significance of the Lovely Garbage
+Scow!"
+
+I found a Glue Factory, a Free Untrammeled
+Glue Factory!  I was expressing itself.  It was
+asserting its individuality.  It was saying to the
+Blind Complacent Pillars of Polite Society: "My
+aroma is not your aroma, but my aroma is my
+own!"  Oh, the Courageous Glue Factory, the Free,
+Unfettered Glue Factory!  A thousand Glue Factories,
+from Main to Oregon, are thus rebuking Class
+Prejudice and Bourgeois Smugness.  Like
+Poets, like Prophets of the New Art, they stand,
+Glue Factory after Glue Factory, expressing their
+Egos, Being Themselves, undaunted, unshackled,
+strong, independent, virile!  Oh, to be the Poet of
+the Super Glue Factory!
+
+With violets in my hands I wandered to the
+wilds, and there I met a Buzzard.  He was Being
+Himself!  I wove a wreath of the violets and I
+crowned the Buzzard, and the Buzzard said, "Why
+do you crown me?"  And I said, "Oh, Lovely Buzzard,
+are you not Being Yourself?  Are you not
+rebuking the Trivial Conventionalities of our Organized
+Society?  I know your Dream, O Buzzard!
+Accept this Crown of Violets from our little
+group!"
+
+Come with me to the zoo, and I will bare our
+Souls to the Hyena, and the Hyena will commune
+with us, and we will know the meaning of Life!
+Oh, the lovely Hyena.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOURGEOIS ELEMENT AND BACKGROUND
+
+ISN'T it simply wonderful about D'Annunzio
+enlisting as a common soldier and digging
+trenches along with the Due D'Abruzzi and
+those other Italian poets?  Or was it D'Abruzzi?
+Anyhow, it was one of those poets that were
+always talking about the Superman.
+
+Although, I must say, one doesn't hear so much
+about the Superman these days, does one?  The
+Superman is going out, you know.
+
+One of my friends -- she's quite an advanced
+thinker, too, and belongs to our little group -- told
+me a year or so ago, "Hermione, I will NEVER marry
+until I find a Superman!"
+
+"Of course, that is all right, my dear," I said
+to her, "but how about Genetics?"
+
+Because, you know, the slogan of our little group
+ -- that is, one of the slogans -- is "Genetics or
+Spinsterhood!"
+
+It made her quite angry for some reason.  She
+pursed her lips up and acted shocked.
+
+"It is all very well, Hermione," she said, "to
+discuss Genetics in the ABSTRACT.  But to connect the
+discussion with the marriage of a FRIEND is not, to
+my mind, the proper thing at all!"
+
+Did you ever hear of anything more utterly in-
+consistent?
+
+Oh, Consistency!  Consistency!  Isn't Consist-
+ency perfectly wonderful!
+
+But that is always the way when it comes to
+a discussion of Sex.  The Bourgeois Element are
+NEVER Fundamental and Thorough in their
+treatment of Sex, if you know what I mean.
+
+And, as Fothergil Finch says, in this country we
+are NEARLY all Bourgeois.
+
+We have not had enough Background for one thing.
+
+If all the little groups the country over would
+take up the matter of Background in a serious way,
+something might be done about it, don't you think?
+
+We must organize -- we who are the intellectual
+leaders, you know -- and start an effective propaganda
+for the purpose of obtaining more Background.
+
+
+
+
+
+TAKING UP THE LIQUOR PROBLEM
+
+WE'RE thinking of taking up the Liquor
+problem -- our little group, you know, --
+in quite a serious way.
+
+The Working Classes would be so much better
+off without liquor.  And we who are the leaders
+in thought should set them an example.
+
+So a number of us have decided to set our faces
+very sternly against drinking in public.
+
+Of course, a cocktail or two and an occasional
+stinger, is something no one can well avoid taking,
+if one is dining out or having supper after the
+theater with one's own particular crowd.
+
+But all the members of my own particular little
+group have entered into a solemn agreement not
+to take even so much as a cocktail or a glass of
+wine if any of the working classes happen to be
+about where they can see us and become corrupted
+by our example.
+
+The Best People owe those sacrifices to the
+Masses, don't you think?
+
+Of course, the waiters, and people like that,
+really belong to the working classes too, I suppose.
+
+But, as Fothergil Finch says, very often one
+wouldn't know it.  And who could expect a waiter
+to be influenced one way or another by anything?
+And it's the home life of the working classes that
+counts, anyhow.
+
+When we took up Sociology -- we gave several
+evenings to Sociological Discussion, you know,
+besides doing a lot of practical Welfare Work -- it
+was impressed upon me very strongly that if one is to
+do anything at all for the Masses one must first
+SWEETEN their Home Life.
+
+Though Papa made me stop poking around into
+the horrid places where they live for fear I might
+catch some dreadful disease.
+
+And the people we visited weren't all that grateful.
+So VERY OFTEN the Masses are not.
+
+One dreadful woman, you know, claimed that
+she couldn't keep her rooms -- she had two rooms,
+and she cooked and washed and slept and sewed
+in them and there were five in the family -- claimed
+that she couldn't keep her rooms in any better shape
+because they were so out of repair and the plumbing
+was bad and the windows leaked and all that
+sort of thing, you know, and one of the rooms was
+ENTIRELY dark.
+
+I preached the doctrine of fresh air and sunshine
+and cleanliness to her, you know, and the imprudent
+thing told me Papa owned the building and
+it wasn't true at all -- Papa only belonged to the
+company that owned the building.  One can't do
+much for people who will not be truthful with one,
+can one?
+
+Besides, it is the Silent Influence that counts more
+than arguments and visiting.
+
+If one makes one's life what it should be Good
+will Radiate.
+
+Vibrations from one's Ego will permeate all
+classes of society.
+
+And that is the way we intend to make ourselves
+felt with regard to the Liquor Problem.  We will
+inculcate abstemiousness by example.
+
+Abstemiousness, Fothy Finch says, should be our
+motto, rather than Abstinence.  We shall be QUITE
+careful not to identify ourselves with the MORE
+VULGAR aspects of the propaganda.
+
+And of course at social functions in our private
+homes total abstinence is quite out of the question.
+
+The working classes wouldn't get any example
+from our homes, anyone; for of course we never
+come into contact with them there.
+
+But the working classes must be saved from
+themselves, even if all the employers of labor have
+to write out a list of just what they eat and
+drink and make them buy only those things.  They
+simply MUST be saved.
+
+Not that they'll appreciate it.  They never do.  If
+I were not an incorrigible idealist I would be
+inclined to give them up.
+
+But someone must give up his life to leading them
+onward and upward.  And who is there to do it if
+not we leaders of Modern Thought?
+
+
+
+
+THE JAPANESE ARE WONDERFUL,
+IF YOU GET WHAT I MEAN
+
+DON'T you just dote on the Japanese?
+
+They're so esoteric -- and subtle and all that
+sort of thing, aren't they?
+
+Just look at Buddhism and Shintoism, for
+instance.  Could anything be more subtle and
+esoteric?
+
+We've been taking them up -- our Little Group
+of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and they've
+wonderful, simply WONDERFUL!
+
+Not, of course, that one would BE a Buddhist or
+a Shintoist -- but it's broadening to the mind, don't
+you think, to come in contact with the great
+thought of -- of -- well, really of people like Shinto,
+you know, and those other sages?
+
+And how wonderfully artistic they are -- the
+Japanese!
+
+The new parasols are quite Japanese, you know.
+Haven't you seen them?
+
+I have three, for different costumes.  One is
+covered with embroidered Japanese crepe, and an-
+other with martine silk.
+
+But the one, I think that express ME the most
+accurately -- the one that represents my individuality,
+REALLY -- is made with gold spokes covered with
+black Chantilly lace.  Japanese shape, you know,
+and French workmanship.
+
+And one must strive to represent one's self if one
+is to be honest.
+
+One must put one's soul into one's environment.
+
+Although Environment isn't what it used to be.
+You don't hear Environment spoken of nearly as
+often as you did.
+
+Environment is going out.
+
+But besides being so esoteric and exotic and artistic,
+and all that sort of things, the Japanese are
+wonderfully up to date, too.
+
+Do you know, they actually have a battleship
+named The Tango!
+
+Have you thought deeply of Interstellar Communication?
+
+It promises to be one of the great new problems.
+
+The loveliest man talked to us about it the other
+evening.  "Interstellar Communication in Its Relation
+to Recent Psychic Hypotheses" -- that's the title;
+I wrote it down.  I always take notes of a title like that.
+It helps one to get to the heart of the matter.
+
+Interstellar Communication is wonderful -- simply WONDERFUL!
+
+We're going to take up Mars soon.
+
+Mamma said to me only yesterday: "Hermione,
+you SIMPLY MUST drop some of your serious subjects
+during the hot weather."
+
+"Mamma," I told her, "that was all very well in
+your day -- to take things up and drop them at will.
+But people didn't have a Social Conscience in those
+times.  We advanced thinkers owe a duty to the
+race.  We must grapple with things.  We are not
+content to frivol, I WILL take up Mars!"
+
+And, you know, I don't have the temperament to
+remain idle.  My mind MUST be active.  Sometimes
+when I think how active my mind is, I wonder my
+forehead isn't wrinkled.
+
+And of course that would be a loss -- anything
+is a loss that destroys Beauty.
+
+For, after all, Beauty is what the world needs
+more than anything else.  It's a serious thought --
+how far Use should be sacrificed to Beauty, and
+Beauty to Use, isn't it?
+
+You know that's why I can't join the suffragists.
+I am one, of course, but the suffragist yellow is
+such a HORRID color I simply CANNOT wear it.
+
+
+
+
+SHE REFUSES TO GIVE UP THE COSMOS
+
+WE'VE taken up Gertrude Stein -- our Little
+Group of Serious Thinkers, you know --
+and she's wonderful; simply WONDERFUL.
+
+She Suggests the Inexpressible, you know.
+
+Of course, she is a Pioneer.  And with all
+Pioneers -- don't you think -- the Reach is greater
+than the Grasp.
+
+Not that you can tell what she means.
+
+But in the New Art, one doesn't have to mean
+things, does one?  One strikes the chords, and the
+chords vibrate.
+
+Aren't Vibrations just too perfectly lovely for
+anything?
+
+The loveliest man talked to us the other night
+about World Movements and Cosmic Vibrations.
+
+You see, every time the Cosmos vibrates it means
+a new World Movement.
+
+And the Souls that are in Tune with the Cosmos
+are benefitted by these World Movements.  The
+other souls will get harm out of them.
+
+Frightfully interesting, isn't it? -- the Cosmos, I mean.
+
+I have given so much thought to it!  It has be-
+come almost an obsession to me.
+
+Only the other evening I was thinking about it.
+And without realizing that I spoke aloud I said,
+"I simply could NOT DO WITHOUT the Cosmos!"
+
+Mamma -- poor Mamma! -- she is so terribly
+unadvanced you know! -- Mama said: "Hermione,
+I do not know what the Cosmos is.  But this I
+do know -- not another Sex Discussion or East
+Indian Swami will ever come into THIS house!"
+
+"Mamma," I said to her, "I will NOT give up the
+Cosmos.  It means everything to me; simply EVERYTHING!"
+
+I am always firm with Mamma; it is kinder, in
+the long run, to be quite positive.  But what I
+suffer at home from objections to the advanced
+movements nobody knows!
+
+Nobody but the Leaders of Thought can dream
+what Martyrdom is!
+
+Sacrifice!  Sacrifice!  That is the keynote of the
+Liberal Life!
+
+Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself:
+"Have I shown the Sacrificial Spirit to day?
+Or have I FAILED?"
+
+
+
+
+THE CAVE MAN
+
+DON'T you think the primitive is just simply
+too fascinating for anything?  We've all
+got it in us, you know, and it seems like
+nowadays the more cultured and advanced one is the
+more likely the primitives is to break out on one.
+
+I have a strong strain of the primitive in me, you know.
+
+I wouldn't take anything for it -- it's simply
+wonderful -- wonderful!
+
+It comes over me so strong at times, the yearning
+for the primitive does, that I just sit with a dreamy
+look on my face and murmur to myself: "ALONE,
+ALONE -- UNDER THE STARS!  ALONE!"
+
+Mamma overheard me saying that the other day
+and thought I had gone crazy, and she said: "for
+Heaven's sake, Hermione, what are you thinking
+about, and what do you want?"
+
+"The stars," I murmured, scarcely knowing that
+I spoke aloud, "the stars and my Cave Man!"
+
+Mamma was shocked -- she says for an unmarried
+woman to think of Cave Men is simply indelicate.
+
+Mamma is not at all advanced, you know.
+
+She's dear and sweet, but she doesn't believe in
+Trial Marriages at all.
+
+And I must admit they shocked me when I first
+heard about them.  But that was before I had taken
+up these things seriously.
+
+"Mamma," I said to her, "it is no use for you to
+pretend to be shocked.  I have a right to happiness.
+And happiness to me means being alone, under the
+stars, and walking barefoot and bareheaded in the
+dew."
+
+"Alone with a Cave Man!" she said.  And then
+she cried.
+
+Tears! -- that is so like the old-fashioned woman!
+
+"Mamma," I said, kindly, but firmly, "If it is my
+destiny to be kidnaped by a Cave Man and taken
+into the waste places, under the stars, can I avoid it?"
+
+She said I could at least be respectable, and that
+I was acting like I WANTED to be kidnaped.
+
+And, you know, at times I do feel as if that
+might be my fate, "really.  I am so psychic, you
+know, and psychics feel their fate coming on quicker
+than most people.
+
+I told Mamma that I felt every woman had a
+right to choose the father of her own children, and
+she was shocked again.  And then she wanted to
+know what being kidnaped by a Cave Man had
+to do with choosing the father of one's own children,
+and how did I know but these Cave Men
+kidnaped a different woman every year?
+
+But I settled her.
+
+"Mamma," I said, "you are NOT advanced, and
+so I cannot argue with you.  You wouldn't understand.
+But if I AM primitive -- and I feel that
+I am -- whose fault is it?  Who did I inherit it from?"
+
+She couldn't say anything to that.  She didn't
+like to own that I inherited it from her.  And she
+knew if she blamed it onto Papa I would ask her
+how she DARED to deny me a primitive man when
+she had married one herself.
+
+Finally she quit crying and said, pressing her
+lips together: "Hermione, do you KNOW any of
+those Cave Men?"
+
+But I refused to answer.  I went to my room.
+
+Dissension disturb's the soul's harmony.
+
+One's subliminal consciousness must ever vibrate
+in harmony with the Cosmic All.
+
+I never fuss when a person disturbs me.  I just
+go into the Silences and vibrate there.
+
+But I kept thinking: "DO I know any Cave Men?"
+
+I Think I do -- one.  He tries to conceal it.  But
+it's his secret.  I'm sure.
+
+He has the most luminous eyes!
+
+Like a wolf's, you know, when it gallops across
+the waste places -- under the stars, alone!
+
+And the way he eats!  I don't mean that he's
+noisy, you know.  But the way he crunched a chicken
+bone the last time he dined with me was perfectly
+WONDERFUL -- so nonchalant, you know, and loudly
+and -- and -- well, primitive!  I'm SURE he's one!
+
+I wouldn't go autoing with him for anything --
+unless, of course, he gave me one of those compelling
+glances, like Cave Men do in the magazines, you know.
+Then I'd know it was destiny and useless to resist.
+
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE GROUP GIVES A PAGAN MASQUE
+
+The Little Group gave a party
+   And all of the gods were there,
+From Thor to Miss Susan Astarte
+   With doo-daddles gemming her hair,
+
+Bill Baldur and Jane Aphrodite,
+   Dick Vishnu and Benny O'Baal,
+And Bacchus came on in a nightie
+   With little pink snakes in the tail;
+
+Latin, Phoenician and Hindu
+   Norse and Egyptian and Chink. . . .
+Castor was watching his Twin do
+   Stunts, with a brotherly wink. . . .
+
+Persephone swearing by Hades. . . .
+   A Norn and Sibylline Simp. . . .
+A Momus, who showed up to the ladies
+   The latest Olympian limp.
+
+Was Hermione present?  By Crikey!
+   (This Crikey's a Whitechapel joss)
+
+Our Hermy attended as Psyche --
+   She siked and she got it across
+
+And Fothergil Finch, rather gaumy
+   With Cosmic cosmetics, was there,
+But the Swami went just as the Swami,
+   After oiling the kinks in his hair.
+
+I said to Hermione: "Goddess!
+   You're graceful, you're Greek, you're a rose,
+From the pinions that rise from your bodice
+   To the raddle I note on your toes,
+
+"And Fothergil, here, with his censer,
+   And his little cheeks crimson as beets,
+Your acolyte, perfume-dispenser,
+   Is sweet as a page out of Keats,
+
+"But tell me, my Dea -- my Psyche! --
+   (With your wings outspread as to race
+With that swift and acephalous Nike
+   Who lost her bean somewhere in Thrace) --
+
+"My Thea -- my classical pigeon! --
+   Is not your Sincerity shocked
+By this giddy revue of religion? . . .
+   Are none of these gods being mocked? . . .
+
+"In the regions unknowable -- Thea! --
+   Where the noumenon chumbs with the Nous,
+Where the Idol gets hep to Idea,
+   And pythagoras ogles a Goose,
+
+"In the heavens of Brahm and Osiris,
+    Are they peeved with this revel, I ask? . . .
+Does Pluto like this, where his fire is? . . .
+   What in hell do they think of this masque? . . .
+
+"Where the deities, avid of Is-ness,
+   Resurge from the Flivvers that Were,
+While the wild Chaotical Whizness
+   Gives place to a Cosmic Whir,
+
+"Do they relish this josh of the josses?
+   Do they lamp not the same with a grouch?
+Are you stinging these gloomy Big Bosses
+   To a keener, immortaler ouch?"
+
+Hermione murmured: "How eerie!
+   You are voicing my own Inner Mood!
+Ah me!  but the world is less dreary
+   If one is but understood!
+
+"And I thank you, I thank you, for rising
+   To my personal point of view. . . .
+I THANK you for SYMPATHIZING! . . .
+   Dear man, how you always do!"
+
+
+
+
+SYMPATHY
+
+OF course we're out of town for the summer --
+EVERYBODY'S out of town, now -- but
+I  motor in once or twice a week to keep in
+touch with some of my committees.
+
+Sociological work, for instance, keeps right up
+the year around.
+
+Of course, it's not so interesting in the winter.
+You see more striking contrasts in the winter, don't
+you think?
+
+A couple of girl cousins of mine from Cincinnati
+have been here.  They're interested in welfare work
+of all sorts.
+
+"Hermione," they said, "we want to see the
+bread line."
+
+"My dears," I said, "I don't mind showing it to
+you, but it's nothing much to see in summer.  It's
+in the winter that it arouses one's deepest sympathies."
+
+And one must keep one's sympathies aroused.
+Often I say to myself at night: "Have I been
+sympathetic today, or have I FAILED?"
+
+Mamma often lacks sympathy.  She objects to
+having me reopen my Salon this winter.
+
+"Hermione," she said, "I don't mind the subjects
+you take up -- or the people you take up with -- if
+you only take them up one at a time.  And I am
+glad when your own little group meets here, be-
+cause it keeps you at home.  But I will NOT have
+all the different kinds of freaks here at the SAME
+TIME, sitting around discussing free love and sex
+education."
+
+I was indignant.  "Mamma," I said, "what right
+have you to say they would discuss that all the
+time?"
+
+"Because," she said, "I have noticed that no matter
+whether they start with sociology or psychology,
+they always get around to Sex in the end."
+
+Isn't it funny about pure-minded people? -- in the
+generation before this anything that shocked a pure-
+minded person like Mamma was sure to be bad.
+
+But now its only the evil-minded people who
+ever get shocked at all, it seems.
+
+The really PUREST of the pure-minded people don't
+get shocked by anything at all these days.
+
+I think Mamma is either getting purer-minded all
+the time or is losing some of it -- I can't tell which --
+for she isn't shocked as easily as she was a few
+months ago.
+
+But I got a shock myself recently.
+
+I found out that plants have Sex, you know.
+
+Just think of it -- carrots, onion, turnips,
+potatoes, and everything!
+
+Isn't it frightful to think that this agitation has
+spread to the vegetable kingdom?
+
+I vowed I would never eat another potato as
+long as I lived!
+
+And, after all, what GOOD does it do -- letting the
+vegetable kingdom have Sex, I mean?
+
+Even a good thing, you know, can be carried too far.
+
+"Mamma," I told her, "you are hopelessly behind
+the times.  Sex is a Great Fact.  Someone must
+discuss it.  And who but the Leaders of Thought
+are worthy to?"
+
+I intend to say nothing more about it now -- but
+when the time comes I WILL reopen my Salon.
+
+And as far as talking about Sex is concerned --
+the right sort of mind will get GOOD out of it, and
+the wrong sort will get HARM.
+
+I don't really LIKE discussions of Sex any more
+than Mamma does.  No really nice girl does.
+
+But we advanced thinkers owe a duty to the race.
+
+Not that the race is grateful.  Especially the
+lower classes.
+
+It was only last week that I was endeavoring to
+introduce the cook to some advanced ideas -- for her
+own good, you know, and because one owes a spiritual
+duty to one's servants -- and she got angry and gave notice.
+
+The servant problem is frightful.  It will have to
+be taken seriously.
+
+
+
+
+BLOUSES, BURGARS AND BUTTERMILK
+
+SOME of us -- Our Little Group of Advanced
+Thinkers, you know -- are going in for Bulgarian
+buttermilk.
+
+It came in about the time the Bulgarian blouses
+did -- there was a war over there somewhere, you
+know, before this big war, that made it fashionable.
+
+But the blouses went out, and the buttermilk
+stayed in.
+
+It seems there's a Bulgarian by the name of
+Metchnikoff in Paris who sits down and designs
+these things -- the buttermilk, you know, not the
+blouses.
+
+Isn't science wonderful -- simply WONDERFUL!
+
+We're going to take up Metchnikoff in a serious way.
+You know what he aims to do is to lengthen life.
+
+The question is: "Should life be lengthened?
+Or should it not?
+
+The Leaders of Thought will have to thresh that
+out soon.
+
+The question of old age is a subtle one, isn't it?
+
+And it's very typical of our times, don't you think,
+that we should discuss the problems of old age?
+
+Other epochs have done it, of course, but not
+optimistically.
+
+The question enters into everything -- even millinery.
+
+I'm having the loveliest hat adapted from a
+French model -- to wear with my lingerie costumes,
+you know -- a wide-brimmed black lace with a black
+velvet crown.
+
+It's only recently that young women could afford
+to wear black, even when it was becoming.  When
+Mamma was young it was a sign that youth was
+past.
+
+And nowadays, age doesn't matter so much one
+way or another.  A person is the age one FEELS,
+you know.
+
+Have you thought deeply on Hypnagogic
+Illusions?  We're planning to take them up.
+
+
+
+
+TWILIGHT SLEEP
+
+HAVE you read anything about the Twilight
+Sleep yet?  It's wonderful; simply WONDERFUL!
+
+The loveliest man told our little group all about
+it -- just the other evening.
+
+"Hermione," said Mamma, "I will NOT have you
+taking up any more subjects of that Easy Indian
+character.  No Swami shall ever enter this house
+again!"
+
+"Mamma," I said to her, "you are hopelessly
+unadvanced., It has nothing whatever to do with
+Going into the Silences or Swamis.  It's entirely
+scientific and not psychic at all.  And if it were
+psychic, what then?"
+
+"No Swami," said Mamma, even more stubborn-
+ly, "shall ever darken my door again!"
+
+Poor, dear, stupid Mamma!  She gets things so
+mixed!
+
+"As far as Swamis are concerned," I told her,
+"the debt we owe to them in incalculable.  Where,
+for instance, would we have ever heard of Karma
+if it had not been for the Swamis?"
+
+She couldn't answer; she just looked stubborn;
+unadvanced people always look stubborn and glare.
+
+"Where," I said, "did we get the Vedantas and
+Vegetarianism and Alternate Breathing from?"
+
+She couldn't say a word.  She just pouted.
+
+"Who taught us," I said, "Transmigration of
+Souls and Vibrations?"
+
+She broke down and cried.
+
+"Hermione," she said, "I simply HATE howdahs
+and cobras and swastikas and all those Oriental
+things!"
+
+Mamma has no idea whatever of logic.  She is a
+typical old-fashioned woman.
+
+"Mamma," I said, "cry as much as you like.  You
+shall not disturb MY inner Harmony!  I will not
+permit you to.  And my mind is made up.  I will
+take up the Twilight Sleep in a serious way!"
+
+That settled it, too.
+
+Have you noticed, there's been just a hint of
+autumn in the air these last few days?
+
+Have you seen the new styles for autumn?  They
+are wonderful; simply WONDERFUL!
+
+
+
+
+INTUITION
+
+IN spite of all we've done for them -- by we I
+mean the serious thinkers of the world -- some
+people are so frightfully uncultured!
+
+A girl asked me the other day -- and the surprising
+thing about it, too, is that she belonged to our
+own Little Group of Advanced Thinkers -- she asked
+me: "Hermione, don't you just done on Rubaiyat's
+poetry?"
+
+For a moment I couldn't think who she meant at all.
+
+"He's not an American, is he?" I said.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "he's some sort of an Oriental."
+
+"It isn't Rubaiyat you're thinking of, my dear,"
+I told her.  It's Rabindranath.  Rabindranath
+Something-or-other, that new man -- he's wonderful,
+ my dear, simply wonderful."
+
+And then she quoted some of it and -- the idea
+is too absurd for anything, but what do you sup-
+pose it was?
+
+Omar Khayyam -- imagine!
+
+And really, you know, it's been years since anybody
+quoted Omar Khayyam; he's QUITE gone out, you know!
+
+Even the question whether he was moral doesn't
+attract any attention any more.  Although as far
+as that is concerned, the pure mind will get purity
+out of him and the impure mind will get impurity.
+Honi sit qui -- what is the rest of it?  Oh, you
+know -- it's Latin -- what the Romans used to say
+about Caesar's wife and her continual suspicions.
+
+My, how a suspicious wife can handicap a man!
+
+But, of course, as women get more and more
+advanced, and know about the lives men lead, they
+are finding out that the suspicions were justified.
+
+Their intuitions told them so all the time.
+
+I have a lot of intuition myself -- the moment a
+man comes I judge him in spite of myself.
+
+First impressions always last with me, too.
+
+You know, I'm very psychic.
+
+Sometimes I am almost frightened when I think
+of the things my intuition would tell me if I al-
+lowed it to roam at will, so to speak, among my
+friends and acquaintances.
+
+But I restrain it.  One must, you know.  The
+loveliest man gave us such an interesting talk on
+self-restraint the other evening.
+
+And now I always ask myself the last thing be-
+fore I go to bed at night: "Have I restrained my-
+self today?  Or have I failed?"
+
+There is no real culture without restraint, you know.
+
+That's where the English are so superior, don't
+you think?
+
+I met the loveliest Englishman the other evening.
+The moment I saw him I said to myself he
+was one of the aristocracy.  Other people have
+noses like theirs, of course, but it is only the
+English aristocracy who can CARRY that kind of a nose.
+
+And my intuition was correct -- there are only
+five lives between him and a title, and one of those
+is a polo player and another is at the front.
+
+Someone told me his family were paying him
+not to go home, but what they think the poor man
+would do if he were in England I don't know,
+because they don't duel there, you know.  If they
+dueled there, of course, he might dispose of all
+five lives.
+
+Don't you think those old European families are
+so, so -- well, so ROMANTIC somehow?
+
+
+
+
+STIMULATING INFLUENCES
+
+SCIENCE and philanthropy should go hand in
+hand -- two hearts that beat as one, if you
+know what I mean, and all that sort of thing.
+
+And they do, too.  We were discussing it the
+other evening -- our Little Group of Serious
+Thinkers, you know -- and we decided that what
+philanthropy owes to science is made up by what
+science owes to philanthropy.
+
+Isn't it wonderful how things balance like that?
+
+There's the Twilight Sleep and the Mother-
+Teacher Idea, for instance.
+
+Our little group are thinking of starting a
+propaganda to urge ALL Teachers to be Mothers.
+
+And, of course, a lot of them might object -- but
+along comes the Twilight Sleep and takes away all
+POSSIBLE objections.
+
+And along comes Philanthropy to put the Twilight
+Sleep within the reach of all -- at least, we
+hope it will -- and we're going to take the matter up
+with some of the Philanthropists right away.
+
+Isn't it just simply WONDERFUL how Modern
+Thought brings subjects like that together?
+
+Of course, even Modern Thought couldn't do it,
+unless the subjects belonged together, anyhow, could
+it?  Unless they were -- er -- er --  --
+
+Well, you know, Affinities.  Though I don't care
+much for the word.
+
+Affinities have quite gone out, you know.  You
+don't hear much about Affinities this autumn.
+
+Nor Soul Mates, either, for that matter.
+
+Though I always will say there's an IDEA behind
+all the talk about them.
+
+Isn't it odd about things that way -- how Ideas
+come and go, you know, and become quite old-
+fashioned, and yet all the time have a QUITE
+profound Idea back of them?
+
+There's Cubist and Futurist Art, for instance --
+one doesn't hear nearly so much about them now,
+though everyone admitted there was an Idea
+behind them.
+
+Of course, no one knew what the Idea MEANT.
+
+But it was stimulating.
+
+And why should an Idea have to MEAN anything
+if it is STIMULATING?
+
+Stimulation!  Stimulation!  That is the secret
+of Modern Life!
+
+One should be receptive to Stimulation -- one
+should strive to Stimulate!
+
+One owes it to the Masses to Stimulate!  It is
+the DUTY of the leaders of Advanced Thought!
+
+Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself,
+"Have I been a Stimulating Influence today?
+Or have I failed?"
+
+Fothergil Finch says I Stimulate HIM!
+
+Poor, dear man! -- he's becoming quite -- quite --
+well, er -- er -- TOO encouraged, if you know what I mean.
+
+Yes, that is the way with poets.
+
+I doubt if ANY poet ever understood a purely
+Platonic Friendship.
+
+I gave him a long, long look last evening and said,
+"Fothergil, CAN you keep on the Platonic Plane?"
+
+He only said, "Alas!  The Platonic Plane!"
+
+I hope he can.  I need him for my Salon.
+
+I'm having the entire ground floor of the house
+done over for that, you know, and I may reopen it
+any time now!
+
+
+
+
+POLITICS
+
+I'M thinking of taking up politics in a practical
+way.
+
+I've never been an active suffragist, you
+know, on account of that horrid yellow color on the
+banners and things.
+
+But one must sacrifice Ideals of Beauty to Ideals
+of Usefulness, mustn't one?
+
+And politics is fascinating; simply FASCINATING!
+
+Going about and organizing working girls, you
+know, and seeing Corrupt Bosses and enlisting them
+for Moral Causes, and making one's self felt as a
+Force -- could one make one's self more Utile?
+
+More spiritually Utile?
+
+Utility!  That is what our Leaders of Thought
+need to develop!
+
+Nearly every night before I go to bed I say to
+myself: "Have I been Utile today?  Or have I
+FAILED?"
+
+Politics, practical politics, will be such an outlet
+for my personality, too.
+
+And when I reopen my Salon I can make it count
+for the Cause, too.
+
+We are going to give an evening soon -- our
+Group of Advanced Thinkers, you know -- to a serious
+ and thorough study of political economy.  They
+say it's simply wonderful.
+
+The loveliest woman talked to us the other evening.
+She's a poet.  When women have charge of
+affairs, she said, Humanitarianism, Idealism and the
+Poetic Spirit will rule in public life.
+
+Won't that be lovely?
+
+But we must be practical, and get the Bosses on
+our side.  They are simply horrid people socially
+and ethically, you know.  But there's something
+frightfully fascinating about the idea of bearding
+them in their dens with petitions and things.
+
+Though how the idea of abolishing men altogether
+will work out I don't know.
+
+Some of the leaders of the Cause seem to want it.
+I have no doubt that it could be done.  Some plants and
+insects have only the female sex, you know.  And
+maybe the human race will be that way one day.
+
+Although, for my part, if they could only be
+reformed I'd favor retaining men.
+
+There's something about them so -- so -- well, so
+MASCULINE somehow, if you know what I mean.
+
+But I must hurry -- I have to do some shopping.
+
+Clothes are a bore, aren't they?
+
+
+
+
+HERMIONE ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
+
+SPIRITUALISM is becoming quite the thing,
+isn't it?
+
+Dear Sir Oliver Lodge has been proving
+some more things quite recently, you know.  How
+anyone could doubt a man with such a lovely head
+and face I can't imagine.
+
+Spiritualism and Spiritism are quite different, you
+know.  It has been a long time, really, since
+Spiritualism was taken seriously.
+
+Except by superstitious people, of course.
+
+But Spiritism has come to stay.  It has nothing
+to do with superstition at all.  It's part of Advanced
+Thought -- quite scientific, you know, while
+Spiritualism was just a fad.
+
+And Spiritualism is somehow more -- well, er --
+VULGAR if you get what I mean.  The sort of people
+one cares to know well have dropped Spiritualism
+for Spiritism.
+
+Though, of course, a ghost is a ghost, whether it
+is materialized by spiritualism or Spiritism.
+
+I have been often told that I am naturally very
+clairvoyant -- if I were developed I would make a
+splendid medium.  Mediums have seen shapes
+hovering around my head, and once when I was at
+school I did some automatic writing.
+
+It was the strangest, easiest thing!  I had a pencil
+ in my hand and without thinking of anything in
+particular at all I just scribbled away, and what I
+wrote was, "When in the course of human events
+it becomes necessary; When in the course of human
+events it becomes necessary," over and over again.
+
+I was quite startled, for the last thing I had been
+thinking of was an algebra examination, and not
+history at all.  We had had our history examination
+days before.
+
+I felt as if an unseen hand had reached out of
+the Silences and grasped mine!
+
+Wasn't it weird?
+
+And I know who it was, too.  A distant relative
+of Mamma's on her father's side, by marriage, was
+one of the men who signed the Constitution of the
+United States in Faneuil Hall, in Philadelphia, in
+1776, and it was HIS spirit that was trying to de-
+liver his message through me!
+
+And only last year I came across a very similar
+case.  Only this was stranger than mine, if any-
+thing.  For it happened on a typewriter -- which
+proves that the veil between the two worlds must
+be very thin, doesn't it, if the spirits are taking up
+modern inventions?
+
+It happened to one of Papa's stenographers.  I
+had her up to the house to take notes for a report
+I was making to one of the sociological committees
+I was on then.
+
+And she took the notes and put them into shape
+for me, but when she sent the report to me the back
+of one of the sheets was just full of one sentence
+written over and over again.  She didn't know she'd
+included that sheet, of course.
+
+It was so curious I asked her about it.
+
+She looked a little queer and said that when she
+wasn't thinking of anything in particular, but just
+sitting before her typewriter and not working, she
+always wrote that sentence.
+
+"It just comes into my head," she said, "and I
+write it."
+
+"An occult force guides your fingers?"  I asked.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, that's it," she said.
+
+Over and over and over again she had written,
+"Now is the time for all good men to come to the
+aid of the party."
+
+And here is the eerie part of it -- it almost frightened
+me when I got it out of her! -- her father had
+been some sort of politician; a district leader, or
+something like that.  And he was dead, and she
+had had to go to work.
+
+But he was trying to deliver a message through her!
+
+Isn't Psychical Research simply wonderful!
+
+Not that I'd care to go in for any vulgar thing
+such as tin trumpets, you know, but -- --
+
+Well, there's the Astral Body.  That hasn't been
+vulgarized at all, if you get what I mean.  Really,
+the Best People have them.
+
+
+
+
+ENVOY
+
+HERMIONE, THE DEATHLESS
+
+She will not die! -- in Brainstorm Slum
+   Fake, Nut and Freak Psychologist
+Eternally shall buzz and hum,
+   And Spook and Swami keep their tryst
+   with Thinkers in a Mental Mist.
+You threaten her with Night and Sorrow?
+   Out of the Silences, I wist,
+More Little Groups will rise tomorrow!
+
+The lips of Patter ne'er are dumb,
+   The Futile Mills shall grind their grist
+Of sand from now till Kingdom Come;
+   The Winds of Bunk are never whist.
+   You scowl and shake an honest fist --
+You threaten her with Night and Sorrow?
+   Go slay one Pseudo-Scientist,
+More Little Groups will rise tomorrow!
+
+With Fudge to feed the Hungry Bum
+   She plays the Girl Philanthropist --
+Each pinchbeck, boy Millenium
+   She swings, a Bangle, at her wrist --
+   Blithe Parrot and Pert Egoist,
+You threaten her with Night and Sorrow?
+   Hermiones will aye persist!
+More Little Groups will rise tomorrow!
+
+She, whom Prince Platitude has kissed,
+   You threaten her with Night and Sorrow?
+Slay her by thousands, friend -- but list:
+   More Little Groups will rise tomorrow!
+
+(I)
+
+
+
+[END]
+
+
+
+Table of typist's changes:
+
+Original Table of Contents was in large and small caps.
+   Typist converted to upper and lower case.
+
+p3     Original "Anaemic" has letters "ae" printed as a single letter.
+Changed to "anemic"
+
+p31   "is comprised" changed to "it comprised".
+
+p37   "blase" with grave accent mark over "e" changed to "blase'"
+with single mark following the "e".
+
+p39   Accent mark removed from second "e" in "eugenie".
+
+p65   Circumflex removed from first "e" in "fete".
+
+p69    Dieresis removed from "e" in "stael".
+
+p70   Dieresis removed from second "o" in "cooperate".
+
+p75   Circumflex removed from first "e" in "fete".
+
+p106   Original "Anaemic" has letters "ae" printed as a single letter.
+Changed to "anemic"
+
+p113   Acute accent mark removed from "e" in "ecru".
+
+p123   Grave accent mark removed from "e" in "winged".
+
+p126   "Aegean" with "AE" as a single combined capital letter]
+changed to "Aegean".
+
+p154   Circumflex removed from first  "e" in "crepe".
+
+p156   "benefited" changed to "benefitted"
+
+p163   "Phoenecian" with "oe" printed as a single combined letter
+changed to "phoenecian".
+
+p176   "Caesar" with "ae" printed as a single combined letter
+changed to "Caesar".
+
+p176    "duelled" changed to "dueled".
+
+Throughout, "m dashes" are converted to "space hyphen hyphen space".
+
+Single extra line spacing is provided between paragraphs for ease
+of reading on screen.
+
+Chapter and book titles on every page of the original are omitted.
+
+Italics are marked with HTML tags <i> and </i>
+
+I changed these to CAPs for emphasis, and deleted the rest. [mh]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers
+