Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/182

Hermione 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, because 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 it's 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 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. [168]