Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Intuition
INTUITION
IN 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 anybody quoted Omar Khayyam; he's quite gone out, you know!
Even the question whether he was moral doesn't attract any attention any more. Although as far as that is concerned, the pure mind will get purity out of him and the impure mind will get impurity. Honi soit qui—what is the rest of it? Oh, you know—it's Latin—what the Romans used to say about Cæsar's wife and her continual suspicions.
My, how a suspicious wife can handicap a man!
But, of course, as women get more and more advanced, and know about the lives men lead, they are finding out that their suspicions were justified.
Their intuitions told them so all the time.
I have a lot of intuition myself—the moment a man comes I judge him in spite of myself.
First impressions always last with me, too.
You know, I'm very psychic.
Sometimes I am almost frightened when I think of the things my intuition would tell me if I allowed it to roam at will, so to speak, among my friends and acquaintances.
But I restrain it. One must, you know. The loveliest man gave us such an interesting talk on self-restraint the other evening.
And now I always ask myself the last thing before I go to bed at night: "Have I restrained myself today? Or have I failed?"
There is no real culture without restraint, you know.
That's where the English are so superior, don't you think?
I met the loveliest Englishman the other evening. The moment I saw him I said to myself he was one of the aristocracy. Other people have noses like theirs, of course, but it is only the English aristocracy who can carry that kind of a nose.
And my intuition was correct—there are only five lives between him and a title, and one of those is a polo player and another is at the front.
Someone told me his family were paying him not to go home, but what they think the poor man would do if he were in England I don't know, because they don't duel there, you know. If they duelled there, of course, he might dispose of all five lives.
Don't you think those old European families are so, so—well, so romantic, somehow?