“You don’t have to be dignified till you get married or inherit money. Tell you what! You come, Mammy! You can dance some nice, old-fashioned sort of waltz. Come on!”
“I ought to!” she thought. “It’s my duty to enter into their amusements—as long as I can’t stop them.”
But after half an hour spent there, she was more than ever determined to influence them—all of them—in an opposite direction, away from this unpalatable and promiscuous vulgarity.
“Don’t you think it is better to be bored than to amuse yourselves in such a way as this?” she asked, on the way home.
“No!” said Andrée and Bertie, simultaneously.
“It seems a pity to me that young people like you—intelligent and well-bred, should be so mad about amusement,” she said. “I can’t understand it! If you were brainless and dull, it would be different. But there are so many really interesting things in the world, so many wholesome and fine recreations—”
“Never heard of them, Mammy! What are they?”
“When I was a girl, we thought it a pleasure to take a country walk with an interesting companion—”
“You wouldn’t like the companions that we’d think were interesting,” said Andrée.
“No,” said Bertie, sadly. “There aren’t any nice amusements left, Mammy. Evolution has done away with ’em.”