Miss Hippiness let a dreaminess invade her eyes.
"Children," she said in her fond voice, "the 20th Century has never been duplicated. It stands unique in history. Think of the richness of that far age when a person could actually choose what he was going to do in life, and where there were still hunger and sickness and want and—"
"And wars," said little Charley Tencharles.
"Yes," said Miss Hippiness. "And accidents hurting people faster than seconds in a clock. And people fighting each other and cursing each other with words we don't even know any more."
"Like someday-vitch," cried Marymarymary.
Miss Hippiness rolled her eyes in joy. "It was son of a bitch, dear," she said. "It was a string of tiny real words that slished off the tongue like a string of bright little silver daggers."
"Yes, teacher," the children chorused, squirming in wonder.
"And there were the gangsters, those wonderful, wonderful eccentric persons, like the robinhoods and beowulfs I've told you about. And yes, there were the bombs that went bam and boom and wham, and made beautiful colors and high gorgeous mushrooming clouds—like the pictures in the ancient book I smuggled in to show you the other day."
"And people blown to bits," said Stan Thirtystanley in a fake grownup voice.
"To little itsy-bitsy bits," Miss Hippiness cried. "The 20th Century, children. Ah, what happiness to have lived then, the whole world violent and dangerous and seething and exciting like a string of storybooks every inch of the way around the equator. But where you could be an individual—your own boss, they used to call it."