This was as an aside, an interlude. She had a sudden perception of another phase of the subject, and forthwith entered upon it.
"Then, this lack of standard is obvious in matters of far more importance—it enters the domestic circle. I suppose no one ever found housekeeping very great fun, but in my young days nobody ever protested. There may have been shirks, but they hid their misdeeds. Now, there is a clamour of open detestation of all domestic concerns. It began with the caterer; in old times one's own establishment was competent to furnish the refreshments of every entertainment—to have cakes baked or ices frozen out of one's own house would be a confession of being beyond one's depth, and of seeking to entertain more elaborately and making more pretensions than one was entitled to sustain. A household valued its reputation for fine dinners, and elaborate refreshments at dancing parties; people even had specialties that you saw nowhere else, and were sometimes grudging of receipts, and kept some choice concoctions a dead secret. To have additional waiters hired for the occasion—unless indeed it were a ball—was unheard of in houses of good style. Then, when the caterer was fairly established, the expense accounts came in and cut down the menu——"
"Till it got down to the delectable cup of tea and the midget sandwich, with an appetising baby ribbon round its tum-tum," interpolated Frank.
"Be still, Francis. In old times every article must be perfection—the heads of families would be bowed in shame if aught were amiss with cooking or service—but now it is all the caterer's affair, even the decorations—sometimes actually the china."
Mr. Jardine was fully ten years Mrs. Laniston's junior, but he was sufficiently retrospective, and his experience sufficiently extensive in days gone by, to make him interested in her animadversions on the present, and her theory of the superiority of the past. He was of a temperament older than his age, and he sympathised rather with the stately methods of yore than the less exacting fashions of the present day. Thus he found it no hardship to moralise on the signs of the times, with his cigar graciously permitted, and his eyes on the far-away storm, with an interlocutor intelligent enough to evolve and present subjects of sufficient interest to titillate his understanding, requiring no exertion on his part, and loquacious enough to discuss them with an ability which did not call for interference, or contradiction, or instruction from him. His was a facile acquiescence, and Mrs. Laniston, accustomed to talk for time, while some factional whips of one of her clubs awaited the appearance of dilatory voters, before a momentous question should be put to the arbitration of the majority, had by no means exhausted the suggestions the outlook presented to her discerning contemplation.
"Now here is another phase that appeals more directly to you than to me, Mr. Jardine. I will venture to say that in the last ten years, since your college days in fact, there has supervened a total change in the popular estimate of youth. Formerly in society it was the young man with the reputation for talent who was in the ascendant. Merely rich men had to stand back. You must have known intellectual young fellows who enjoyed all the prestige of achievement, a positive value, merely on the strength of their glowing promise of development. A man was said to be talented—this reputation lifted him into a prominence that naught else could compass. People spoke of him with respect. If a girl desired to marry a man of that sort, yet in college, or new to the bar, it was considered a safe thing even if he were poor—so sure he was to make his mark. Now-a-days they live a life apart as students; a career is not the focus of their regards. Their identity is compassed in their position as back-stop, or stop-gap——"
"Oh, hi!" interpolated Frank.
"—Or whatever it may be called in their insufferable jargon. A young man who goes to college to study, and who does it, is contemned as a grind. Such a thing as taking exercise for health merely in order to be able to study, to clear the brain—like a horseback ride, or a long walk—is antiquated. They exercise for the play—as if their playing days were not over; for the competition—the great children! My Frank there would rather lead the sprinters in the track team than win the medal for oratory——"
Frank did not deny this.
"—And he would be more envied and thought a better man than the medalist."