Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Hermione on Superficiality
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Mamma has been trying to get me to give up the moral uplift entirely, but you've just simply got to talk it or be out of date.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 taken 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 remember 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 horrid yellow sashes. And my complexion can't stand yellow. So I quit the Suffrage Party right there.