“—and a reformer nowadays has a passion for beginning on the children. Please don’t. Some of these reforming women remind me of the advertisement in the London paper: ‘Bulldog for sale. Will eat anything. Very fond of children.’ These reforming women will reform anything—and they are very fond of children.”
“It is particularly the American girl,” I went on, “who is illustrating the modern yearning to skip intervals, to ignore the ordinary processes of time. She is like Horace Walpole, who found that the deliberation with which trees grow was ‘extremely inconvenient to his natural impatience.’ It doesn’t seem to make any difference how rigidly her ‘coming out’ time is fixed, she is getting to be a woman before her time. Mark me, Professor, she knows too much, she—”
“A strictly masculine anxiety, sir.”
“—she knows too much, to the exclusion of some other things she doesn’t know.”
“Now don’t mention the kitchen,” cried the Professor, “I am dreadfully tired of that.”
“No, Professor, her general cleverness always seems to me to make the kitchen anxiety needless to a great extent. I mean that in knowing so much and assuming so much the American girl child may be missing some of that sweetness that for her lies in a more old-fashioned girlhood. As a kind of unbent twig she is losing some of the more dependent happiness belonging to her and not grudged to her. Mind you, Professor, if a crime has been committed, I am accessory—”
“I began with that assumption,” remarked the Professor.
“—and I am hoping that there has been no crime, that the unbent twig is growing all right on its own account, that our spoiled daughters, weary of privilege, may be longing to serve, that if her modesty is not expressed in meek eyes ‘full of wonder,’ her lofty glance is not, Hermes-like, given to lying. Whatever the future may have in store, she at least is what she seems to be. Her sentiments may sometimes be irreverent, but they are her own. Perhaps the reason she seems more of an individual than the archetypal girl is, as you have suggested, that we have stripped her of the hypocrisy by which she pretended not to be a unit but only the mute shadow of a unit.”
“O, you will come around!” chuckled the Professor.