He gazed at himself intently over the drifts of lather and twisted his shaving mirror to the most propitious angle from time to time. In the room across the hall—Eleanor’s room, he always called 220 it to himself—his young niece was singing bits of the Mascagni intermezzo interspersed with bits of the latest musical comedy, in a rather uncertain contralto.
“My last girl came from Vassar, and I don’t know where to class her.”
Peter’s mind took up the refrain automatically. “My last girl—” and began at the beginning of the chorus again. “My last girl came from Vassar,” which brought him by natural stages to the consideration of the higher education and of Beulah, and a conversation concerning her that he had had with Jimmie and David the night before.
“She’s off her nut,” Jimmie said succinctly. “It’s not exactly that there’s nobody home,” he rapped his curly pate significantly, “but there’s too much of a crowd there. She’s not the same old girl at all. She used to be a good fellow, high-brow propaganda and all. Now she’s got nothing else in her head. What’s happened to her?”
“It’s what hasn’t happened to her that’s addled her,” David explained. “It’s these highly charged, hypersensitive young women that go to pieces under the modern pressure. They’re the ones that need licking into shape by all the natural processes.” 221
“By which you mean a drunken husband and a howling family?” Jimmie suggested.
“Yes, or its polite equivalent.”
“That is true, isn’t it?” Peter said. “Feminism isn’t the answer to Beulah’s problem.”
“It is the problem,” David said; “she’s poisoning herself with it. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen it happen. My cousin Jack married a girl with a sister a great deal like Beulah, looks, temperament, and everything else, though she wasn’t half so nice. She got going the militant pace and couldn’t stop herself. I never met her at a dinner party that she wasn’t tackling somebody on the subject of man’s inhumanity to woman. She ended in a sanitorium; in fact, they’re thinking now of taking her to the—”
“—bug house,” Jimmie finished cheerfully.