Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Isis, the Astrologist
ISIS, THE ASTROLOGIST
WE'RE taking up astrology quite seriously—our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know—and we've hired the loveliest lady astrologer to cast our horoscopes and give us a talk and get us started right.
She wrote a letter to me—the most perfectly fascinating letter—and I told her to call, and we looked her over. She wore a beautiful sky-blue gown with gold stars on it—one of those Greek ones, you know, like poor, dear Isadora Duncan wore—and a gold star in the middle of her forehead.
"It makes her look like a unicorn, that star," Ravenswood Wimble said. But then nobody ever pleases Ravenswood Wimble completely. He is so—if you get me.
"If a unicorn, then a celestial unicorn," Fothy Finch said. Fothy is too dear for anything; he is always hunting for the good in people, like Apollo, or Euripides—which was it?—when they gave him the basket full of wheat and chaff, and he separated them. Or maybe it was Diogenes.
She has six sisters, and they are all astrologers, and they call them the Pleiades.
Although Voke Easeley, in his horrid slangy way, said: "Pleiades? She's a Bear!"
Don't you just utterly loathe slang?
But I was going to tell you about the lovely letter she wrote—that's what attracted me to her at the first.
"Have you never asked yourself," it began, "Why was I born?"
Fancy knowing that about one! If there is one question I have asked myself thousands and thousands of times it is, "Why was I born?"
And then the letter went on to talk about horoscopes and the Inevitable.
"We may not overcome the Inevitable," it said, "but it is ours to see that the Inevitable does not overcome us."
Oh, the Inevitable! The Inevitable!
How often I have thought of the Inevitable with despair!
And it has never occurred to me before that one could take it and use it as one pleased. But it seems one can if one knows about it beforehand. It is like Destiny that way. If one is ignorant of one's Destiny, it comes upon one with a surprise. But if one knows beforehand what one's Destiny is to be, one can make oneself the master of it. That is where the horoscope comes in so handy, you know.
After dipping into Astrology I will never again be afraid of the Inevitable.
As the Letter says: "Every woman with her horoscope before her, and her Soul back of her, should be able to solve any problem and meet any situation that may occur in her life."
Ravenswood Wimble wanted to know, when he met the lady—did I tell you that her professional name is Isis?—what would happen if her Soul was before her and her horoscope back of her. But Isis just simply froze him with a look.
Don't you think that levity is horrid in the midst of vital affairs like that?
But I suppose every little group has someone in it that thinks he or she has to be quippy and facetious at times.
Not but what I have a sense of humor myself.
I think a sense of humor is the saving grace, if you get what I mean.
But no one should try to use it unless he is perfectly sure that everyone understands he is being humorous.
We are going to take up the sense of humor—our Little Group of Thinkers, you know—in a serious way soon.
But the Swami doesn't like Isis. Poor, dear Swami! She is a charlatan, he says. And she doesn't like him. "My dear," she said to me, "are you sure he really goes into the Silences? Or does he just pretend to?"
Isn't it awful about geniuses that way—how jealous they are of each other? Especially psychics! We had two mediums the same evening a year or two ago who actually quarreled over which one of them a certain spirit control belonged to.