for this occasion," said Hermione 1 do hope I'm properly gowned
as she snuggled down into her front seat and dropped her opera cloak off her shoulders.
"There's such a comfort in feeling your costume is in harmony with the timbre of an evening, in tune with relativity, if you get what I mean! The moment you invited me to come this evening I began thinking what to wear. 'Any simple dinner frock' said Mama. (Dear Mama has no feeling for subtleties.) But, as I said tu her, all my dinner gowns seemed to suggest cating rather than thinking and I didn't think the lecturer would feel them sympathetic. A discordant costume might be worse for him than the pain of physics' Professor Einstein talks about. My dancing gowns would' do either, though often I do have very serious thoughts at a party. I'm such aa earnest observer! Of course I have a thinking dress.' I always wear it when I'm writing a Club paper; but that was too severe for evening.
"Our Club? O yes, didn't you know that we have a little group of Shanghai's Serious Thinkers? We meet every Wednesday afternoon at the Astor and of course we're there conveniently for the tea dance afterwards. This week we had current events as usual, a debate on Bergson's 'Blan Vital' (he's quite vogue again now!) and I did the paper on Einstein, That's why I feel so en rapport with Relativity.
"The deeper I got into his philosophy the more I realized that no ordinary frock would do, so I evolved this. How do you like it? I wanted it original and daring like the theory, and yet with an energy to which a certain discretion must be attributed, if you follow me. Papa said there was surely no fourth dimension it, and little enough of the other three; but I think that this midnight black, draped with these chiffons whose relative probability calls for investigation just carries out Professor Eistein's idea, don't rout "O, here he comes! I suppose we'll have to stop talking, not but what I'd almost as soon have you go on explaining these theories to me, Professor Brown."
"Tsn't it just too sweet and polite of Professor Robertson to say "You will remember' and as you recall' and then go on to mention things you never heard of since school. Of course though, you, teaching Physics, do remember.
"He has such nice hasn't he? Haven't curly hair, you noticed how much more interesting a _good-looking lecturer always is. What? I really don't think you could have been listening to me.
The lecture
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.