APPARATUS:
1 City
1 Brief case
REMARKS:
Most of ardent advocates of social improvement are the products of conventional environment. They are inclined to class together all of the rules of conduct which they have denounced as part of a deliberate scheme to slow up the progress of humanity’s freedom. If you can associate in their minds the conventional concept of morality with the mossgrown ideas of property and government so horrible to the advanced thinker, you are well on the road to success.
BE INDEPENDENT!
Walking home from the meeting of the Social Science Club, you are more quiet than usual. It is strange that you should be quiet at all; you aren’t that type. Both of you love to talk; your intimacy has grown up in spite of, rather than because of this tendency. You became acquainted two or three months before, across the crowded room of the Communist Club when you both leaped to your feet to refute some heretical statement by the speaker of the evening, who had expressed an unsound and intolerant view concerning Union rule. You had cried out together in protest, turned and looked at each other, faltered, and sat down. Then you both had risen again, even more precipitately, looked at each other again in a less amiable manner, and started to speak again. The crowd laughed. At last she had bowed to you jerkily and sat down again, leaving the field to you.
But when she heard what you had to say she did not dislike you so much. You expressed her views exactly. To be sure, you did not say all there was to be said, and when you finished she had to make several additions. But after the meeting you waited for each other and took up the thread of the argument again. You walked five miles that night and didn’t notice. Ever since then you have been seeing a good deal of each other, at little Russian restaurants where each pays his own check, at concerts where you each firmly buy your own tickets, and even at her home, where her family gazes upon you with disfavor and tries to persuade her to wear a hat when she goes out with you.
Tonight there is a tension in the air between you, and you do not know what to do about it. She has been quarreling with her family and you have discussed it backwards and forwards and all around; there was no more to say.
“I don’t understand you at all,” repeat for the twentieth time. “You’re so intelligent about everything but your own affairs. Can’t you see that you must attack your own problem with an impersonal sort of attitude? It’s the only sensible way to do anything.”