Part 50

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.