"Perhaps they're not. All the better. Perhaps something will come of it—unless they enjoy their unhappiness too much, as some of them do. She doesn't understand that there have been changes since she was a girl."
"Only too well." Mrs. Mayne showed spirit.
"Well, she doesn't sympathise with them. She doesn't realise her standards don't apply to to-day. She's absolutely——"
"I'm sure I'm very faulty," agreed Mrs. Mayne, almost approvingly. Edgar laughed at his mother's unquenchable power to discomfit Claudia, and the two exchanged a glance.
"As for Edgar," proceeded Claudia, "he's quite hopeless. I bring friends here, and he thinks they're awful. So they are—he's quite right. But I shouldn't know they were awful if he didn't point it out. That's the disastrous consequences of bringing people here. Edgar says nothing about them at all, and so he stimulates my corrosive faculty. He'll drive me to having surreptitious friends."
Patricia's nose was a little in the air.
"I don't think he's very human," she said.
"You see?" Claudia looked in triumph at her brother. To Patricia, she continued. "The trouble about him is, he's a good man. He's old-fashioned. He has principles. It's a nuisance when a man has principles. He was brought up to think it was the thing to be decent and honourable, and so on. He doesn't live in our age at all, when everybody's trying hard to be wicked and only half-succeeding."
"I know," agreed Patricia, relishing the irony but perceiving the truth of her new friend's analysis. "I think it's impossible for one generation to understand the next."
"Exactly. But the next can understand the one—like winking."