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talk it or be out of date.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.

Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers · 第 106 / 153 题