John Musgrave fingered the stem of a wineglass, and appeared for the moment at a loss for a suitable reply. Failing to find any logical answer to this perfectly simple question, he said:
“I don’t like to see women adopting men’s habits. It’s unnatural. It—it loses them our respect.”
“That, I take it,” the vicar returned seriously, “depends less on what they do than the spirit in which they do it. I could not, for instance, lose my respect for Mrs Sommers if I saw her smoking a pipe.”
John Musgrave gasped. Such a possibility was beyond his thinking.
“Would you care to see your own wife smoke?” he asked.
“If she wanted to, certainly,” Mr Errol replied without hesitation. “She hasn’t started it yet. But it would not disconcert me if she did. We live in a progressive age.”
“I doubt whether smoking comes under the heading of progress,” Mr Musgrave returned drily.
Walter Errol looked amused.
“Only in the sense, of wearing down a prejudice,” he replied. “We are old-fashioned folk in Moresby, John. We are hedged about with prejudices; and to us a perfectly harmless pleasure appears undesirable because it is an innovation. Human nature is conservative; it takes unkindly to change. But each generation has to reconcile itself to the changes introduced by the next. One has to move with the times, or be left behind and out of sympathy with one’s world. The world won’t put back to wait for us.”
“Then I prefer,” John Musgrave answered, “to remain out of sympathy.”