Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/174

Hermione Mamma is not at all advanced, you know.

She's dear and sweet, but she doesn't believe in Trial Marriages at all.

And I must admit they shocked me when I first heard about them. But that was before I had taken up these things seriously.

"Mamma," I said to her, "it is no use for you to pretend to be shocked. I have a right to happiness. And happiness to me means being alone, under the stars, and walking barefoot and bareheaded in the dew."

"Alone with a Cave Man!" she said. And then she cried.

Tears!—that is so like the old-fashioned woman!

"Mamma," I said, kindly, but firmly, "if it is my destiny to be kidnaped by a Cave Man and taken into the waste places, under the stars, can I avoid it?"

She said I could at least be respectable, and that I was acting like I wanted to be kidnaped.

And, you know, at times I do feel as if that might be my fate, really. I am so psychic, you know, and psychics feel their fate coming on quicker than most people.

I told Mamma that I felt every woman had a right to choose the father of her own children, and she was shocked again. And then she wanted to know what being kidnaped by a Cave Man had [160]