The girls, swinging their feet encased in the flat, practical tennis shoes of the period, looked their usual momentary cold interest. Their heads, impertinently bobbed, or spectacularly "bunned," had abundant hair that covered bright enough little brains, but their mouths, trained into machine talk, dealt machine-like with little well-worn screws and cogs and belts of words, so that what they turned out was machine like; not related thought or challenging conversation, but trite sentences and inferences and ejaculations that made small circles of thought.
Gertrude, the leader of the village girls, smiled dreamily at the car in question. "It's a good make, isn't it?" she said, then—"That firm's worth millions of dollars, they say, even in these after-the-war days." Minga nodded authoritatively, as one who knew. They all looked at her respectfully.
"The Mede says that to drive that car is to drive molten gold," said Minga—it was understood that Minga spoke of her father as the Mede. No one knew exactly what the allusion meant, but it showed somehow that Minga was no slave to parental authority and that she "knew" history.
"I want Dad to get a new car instead of a new piano," said Cynthia. "With the talking machine and George's cornet we don't really need a piano—but I do need a good roadster to—to get to the library and—and church," Cynthia inclined her head demurely.
"Yah—Yah!" they all jeered. "To get to the library and church! Some getting, I'll say!"
Dunstan looked up. "Whew!" he whistled, "to get to the beauty parlor, to the hashish joint, to the ice-cream palace, to the hooch chapel."
"Yah!" they all laughed, Gertrude a little more spitefully than the others. Cynthia Bradon, a lithe, ripe blonde of sixteen, had had experiences with many things. It was known that she had had a few "shots" of morphine and would swallow, for a wager, many hectic and sulphuric beverages. She had run away and been unaccounted for for a week, she had been photographed in a bathing suit by a moving picture man. Cynthia was not sensitive, and her beauty, peach-like and of a glowing dewiness, seemed about the most harmless beauty in the world, because it covered so empty and so trivial a soul. Among the elders, she was considered a lost character. Among those who knew her she was known to be merely silly, lazy and untidy.
Cynthia's own group accepted her without enthusiasm or criticism. She was regarded as one who was no obstructionist and who by sheer triviality added much to the gayety of nations. Her "line" was silliness. Long education by the sensational type of moving picture had removed from these young people any morbid sensitiveness. "Cinny," and "Cinema" as they called her, wanted to find out about morphine—let her. "Fancy," so named from Frances, was a fine swimmer, always diving against her mother's command. She had saved a child once—moral—if Fancy hadn't disobeyed her mother she couldn't have saved the child! Marjorie, who was fat and too evidently made up, was a good sport and awfully nice at picnics and sailed a boat well and was jolly and fair in all games. Gertrude, dubbed facetiously "the road-hog," had nearly killed an old man by running over him in breaking speed laws; but this fact instead of making her in any way taboo, only served to add to her interest as a rather tragic saturnine young person in extremely abbreviated skirts.
They were all far away from the tradition and early training of the parents who had borne them, spent incalculable money on them, scoured the realm for the best food for them; added to their youthful desires, their green sloths, given them leisure and opportunity and crammed them with diversion but neglected to set them an unswerving example of strong, frank, fearless, reverent and purposeful life. The young people of to-day analyzed like a sort of mischievous ivy or burdock burr, growing rank in the pure garden of our purpose, have become what they are merely by feeding on the soil around them. They are the curious sports of a few rather shameful vines and fruits of our own negligence.
When they speak flippantly of love and marriage, they do so with a very accurate knowledge of the percentage of divorces and the reasons for these divorces. When they reveal all that is legally possible of their fine young bodies, they do so after a war which placed the highest percentage on physical superiority and challenged the needs for privacy, and they do so impelled by frankness and a healthy Narcissism that is much better than our old time reticence, our concealment of deformity and weakness, our æsthetic half-revealing and suggesting that made so strong a desire for full revelation.