Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/189

 INTUITION

N spite of all we've done for them—by we I mean the serious thinkers of the world—some people are so frightfully uncultured!

A girl asked me the other day—and the surprising thing about it, too, is that she belonged to our own Little Group of Advanced Thinkers—she asked me: "Hermione, don't you just dote on Rubaiyat's poetry?"

For a moment I couldn't think who she meant at all.

"He's not an American, is he?" I said.

"Oh, no," she said, "he's some sort of an Oriental."

"It isn't Rubaiyat you're thinking of, my dear," I told her. "It's Rabindranath. Rabindranath Something-or-other, that new man—he's wonderful, my dear, simply wonderful."

And then she quoted some of it and—the idea is too absurd for anything, but what do you suppose it was?

Omar Khayyam—imagine!

And really, you know, it's been years since [175]