"He's a Hedonist," I said.
"Indeed!" she said, "and what sort of modern impropriety is Hedonism? Is it something about Sex, or is it something about Psychics?"
I simply couldn't speak.
I just gave her a look and walked out of the room. It is absolutely useless to attempt to explain anything to Mamma.
She is so Mid-Victorian!
And Mid-Victorianism has quite gone out, you know. Really. The loveliest man gave us a talk on the Mid-Victorian recently, and when he was 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!