Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Will the Best People Receive the Superman Socially?
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 having 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 Fête, 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?