Mr. Wilsey broke in.
“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’ My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every minute of the day, and we have nine. She—”
“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for the full list of her activities.
“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from overwork, just plain overwork.”
Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs. Baxter had gone on.
“That’s so like the modern girl—anything but her obvious duty. She’ll help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go into those courts day after day—’”
“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially. “The women’s courts are places where no—” he hesitated a bare instant, and Mrs. Wayne asked:
“No woman should go?”
“No girl should go.”
“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”