“And why boast that the old-fashioned distinction has disappeared?” Greg thrust forth. “Nowadays the line has vanished. Good and bad comport themselves alike. The ‘good’ girl—so-called—refuses to undertake any of the responsibilities that for centuries have made her sheltered and protected. She paints her face more recklessly than her sister on the street. She aims to out-demi the demi-mondaine in her dress. She does not disdain to use any weapon, no matter how blood-stained, to bring men to her feet; and then she leaves them there. The old-fashioned girl gave a man the mitten. This new girl never kills them off; she must have strings to her bow; she keeps them dangling around her as long as is humanly possible. And then she turns around and says: ‘Men aren’t as chivalrous as they used to be!’” He looked around at them, with almost a sneer. “No wonder things are happening nowadays that a few years ago you couldn’t have believed possible!”
Joy, clutching at her throat, was conscious that her nails were biting into the skin. She was back at her first Prom—last spring. She saw herself standing in front of a mirror gazing in fascination at her white shoulders, her blazing cheeks, her painted lips. Again she beard Jim Dalton telling her what he thought of her appearance. Had she been in some way responsible for what had happened? “You’re ripping me all to pieces.” . . . The words leaped up at her from the stagnant channels of that memory. She drew in her breath so sharply that it caught in her lungs.
“That’s a very fluent argument, Greg,” Harry was saying: “I’m surprised and pleased to see an Eli whose brains weren’t lost under the training table. All the same, I think you’re on the wrong tack. As Jerry says, the old-fashioned girl was poky. I couldn’t stand her alone for five minutes; she’d drive me to drink.”
“Maybe, but she wouldn’t drink with you,” grinned Steve.
“That’s just it, Harry!” said Joy. “An old-fashioned girl bores men nowadays. So what stimulus have we for being old-fashioned?”
“It’s one of those vicious circles,” said Greg. “But the girls are responsible in the first place—they can’t get away from it. They have fooled the men into thinking they’re more attractive this way.”
“Well, they are,” Harry persisted. “I wouldn’t go back to the Clinging-Vine Age for marbles. When I go to see a girl, I want to have a good time with her—and as far as I can see, if the gallants in other times ever did get to see a girl, all they did was sit and twiddle their thumbs.”
“You didn’t hear any complaints from anybody,” said Greg undaunted. “Nobody realized they were having what we could now term a dull time. I tell you things are getting too complicated. There are too many new inventions for having good times. We just dash from one new sensation to the next. When a man goes to see a girl nowadays, what do they do? Do they sit in the parlor and talk, do they go out into the kitchen and make fudge? They do not. They duck the family, and step into his or her father’s Rolls-Royce or Ford and ride seven or seventy miles to the nearest place that has the best dance music or they go to the movies, during which they laugh and talk and say: ‘Why did we come? We could have done this at home and not be bored by a rotten show;’ but they go next time just the same; or if they stay home for once, they gather a large bunch around them and turn on the home jazz variety. Is this true or isn’t it?”
“Well, I fail to see how you can slide all that off on the girl,” said Jerry. “What’s the use of all this moralizing stuff? You know you like a good time as well as the rest of us. To crab at people who are enjoying themselves is a sign of the aged.”
“Look at us to-night,” said Greg. “Here we are paying I-don’t-know-what per couvert to sit in an uninteresting place and watch the world’s most ordinary potpourri, the personnel of a public dance hall, canter around on a bum floor——”