“If you had only seen it all, you would understand—it’s chaos! It will take years, a generation perhaps, before things can be straightened out. Meanwhile ‘it is not always May.’”
“But Beatrice and the other little one—They are lovely!”
“Beauty is a poor dote—young kittens soon make old cats! No, cara mia, they have no chance. You Americans can’t understand: you are still primitive. The American carries off his wife as the Indian his squaw. You are at the natural selection stage.”
“Well, we have been—“
“The man assumes the responsibility of the woman’s support?”
“It’s bad form for a man to ask a dowry or allowance from the girl’s father?”
“The unpardonable sin.”
“I know; my brother married an American. Her father gave her an allowance, but when she died he never offered to pay her funeral expenses—his own child. We thought this unfeeling—dreadful! Americans tell me it probably never occurred to him.”
“We think it is far better for young people to make their own way,” I maintained.