Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/96

Hermione done there wasn't a one of us that didn't go and hide our Tennysons and Ruskins.

Although I always will like "Come into the Garden, Maud."

But he did it with such humor, you know. Isn't a sense of humor a perfectly wonderful thing?

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion, you know—he brought that out so cleverly, the anti-Mid-Victorian man did.

Though so many people who have a sense of humor are so—so, well, so queer about it, if you get what I mean. That is, if you know they have one, of course you re naturally watching for them to say humorous things ; and they re forever saying the sort of things that puzzle you, because you have never heard those things before in just that way, and if you do laugh they re so apt to act as if you were laughing in the wrong place!

And one doesn't dare not to laugh, does one? It's really quite unfair and unkind sometimes! Don't you think so?

We took up a volume on The Analysis of Humor one winter—our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know—and read it completely through, and before the winter was over it got so there wasn't a one of us that dared not to laugh at anything any other one said and—well, it got rather ghastly before spring. Because even if someone wanted to [82]