“There are questions you can't answer to young people, Alice.”
“You mean because we're too young to understand the answer? I don't see that at all. At twenty-two a girl's supposed to have some intelligence, isn't she? And intelligence is the ability to understand, isn't it? Why do I have to wait till I've lived with a man twenty-five years to understand why you can't be tactful with papa?”
“You may understand some things before that,” Mrs. Adams said, tremulously. “You may understand how you hurt me sometimes. Youth can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it, and wouldn't need to ask. You don't understand your father, Alice; you don't know what it takes to change him when he's made up his mind to be stubborn.”
Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. “Well, I don't think making scenes ever changes anybody,” she grumbled. “I think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself.”
“'A little jolly persuasion!'” Her mother turned the echo of this phrase into an ironic lament. “Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too! It didn't work; that's all.”
“Perhaps you left the 'jolly' part of it out, mama.”
For the second time that morning—it was now a little after seven o'clock—tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams. “I might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss a chance,” she said, gently. “It seems queer you don't some time miss just ONE chance!”
But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little concerned. “Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing a man than just hammering at him.”
Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. “'Hammering,' Alice?”
“If you'd left it entirely to me,” her daughter went on, briskly, “I believe papa'd already be willing to do anything we want him to.”