Part 45

"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!