“Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?”
“They ignore nothing.”
“Not even duty?”
“Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored.”
Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon. She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to the egg.
“That, I understand,” she remarked briskly, “is the doctrine of what is called in London the young decadent; and in the country—forgive me—sometimes the young devil of the day.”
“I am decadent, Miss Haddon,” Claude said with a gentle pride that was not wholly ungraceful.
The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy interest.
“How exciting,” she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with a completely natural air. “You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy isn't one, is he?”