§ 1
“The generations rushing to waste like rapids—like rapids....”
Ten years later Oswald found himself repeating the words of the little private schoolmaster.
He was in the gravest perplexity. Joan was now nineteen and a half and Peter almost of age, and they had had a violent quarrel. They would not live in the same house together any longer, they declared. Peter had gone back overnight to Cambridge on his motor bicycle; Joan’s was out of order—an embittering addition to her distress—and she had cycled on her push bicycle over the hills that morning to Bishop’s Stortford to catch the Cambridge train. And Oswald was left to think over the situation and all that had led to it.
He sat alone in the May sunshine in the little arbour that overlooked his rose garden at Pelham Ford, trying to grasp all that had happened to these stormy young people since he had so boldly taken the care of their lives into his hands. He found himself trying to retrace the phases of their upbringing, and his thoughts went wide and far over the problem of human training. Suddenly he had discovered his charges adult. Joan had stood before him, amazingly grown up—a woman, young, beautiful, indignant.
Who could have foretold ten years ago that Joan would have been declaring with tears in her voice but much stiffness in her manner, that she had “stood enough” from Peter, and calling him “weak.”
“He insults all my friends, Nobby,” she had said, “and as for his——. He’s like that puppy we had who dug up rotten bones we had never suspected, all over the garden.
“Oh! his women are horrible!” Joan had cried....