"Duty!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "I don't see where 'duty' comes in. Her 'duty' is to see that her father was wise for her. If he was content there's surely no reason why she should not be so!"
"Hagar," said Miss Serena, "never could see proper distinctions between people. I don't see that working-people are housed so badly—"
Ralph laughed mirthlessly. "Yes, they are, Cousin Serena! Scarcely any of them have tiled bathrooms and the best type of porcelain-lined tub, and very few have libraries that'll accommodate more than a thousand volumes, and quite a number do without nurseries papered with scenes from Mother Goose. And as they're all for that kind of housing, they're preparing to move in—just a little preliminary ousting of a few people with more brains and money and in they go!—cuckoos laying their eggs in abler folks' nests! This is the age of the cuckoo."
"How absurd," said Miss Serena, "Gilead Balm hasn't a tiled bathroom, nor an extremely large library, and when I was a child the nursery wasn't papered at all. But we are perfectly comfortable at Gilead Balm. It's a heinous sin—discontent with your lot in life."
"Do you mean," asked Mrs. LeGrand, "that, against your counsel and advice, Hagar is really going headstrongly on to do this silly thing?"
"Apparently so. She is," said the Colonel, "of age. There again was a mistake—to let women come of age. Perpetual minors—"
Mrs. LeGrand laughed. "Colonel, you are not very gallant!"
The Colonel turned to her. "Oh, my dear friend, you're not the modern, unwomanly type that professes to see something degrading in the subordination that God and Nature have decreed for woman! Gallant! That's just what I am. Knights and gallantry were for the type that's vanishing, though"—he bowed to Mrs. LeGrand, who had not a little of her old beauty left—"though here and there is left a shining example!"
Mrs. LeGrand used her fan. "Oh, Colonel, there are many of us who like the old ways best."