“I wish you’d advise me about Laurie,” said Violet one day, with a troubled glance down the verandah to the bed of down cushions where her brother was devoting to La Vie Parisienne the hours demanded by the institutes of Justinian. “He’s rather a problem.”
“The whole of his generation is a problem,” I said. “He stands between Jim, who’s dead, and Sandy, who’s still a child. He and his like have already borne the burden of the war; now he’ll have to bear the burden of clearing up after the war.”
My proposal found less than no favour in the hearing to which it was directed.
“I’m not bearing any more burdens till I’ve made myself secure,” Laurence declared. “Nor’s any one else. Half the men I know have come back to see another fellow doing their job; the other half are like me and never had a job to come back to. And, while we were away, you let a pack of women into all the professions,” he grumbled.
“Laurie will marry a rich wife,” Sam Dainton prophesied. “I’d do the same myself, only I’m so precious ugly.”
“That doesn’t matter when men are scarce,” said Laurence reassuringly; “but I’d much prefer it if you married the rich wife and let me blow in as the tertium quid. That’s the way all the best marriages are arranged nowadays.”
“I wonder what the modern girl will turn into,” drawled Philip Hornbeck at a tangent.
“The modern girl is a contradiction in terms,” answered Lucien de Grammont. “To modernize yourself is to change; and woman never changes, she only adapts herself.”
“She adapted herself in the war, good and plenty,” said Sam Dainton with authority.
“She was brought up to know nothing,” rejoined Barbara; “she thought she knew everything. With luck she’ll learn enough to bring her daughters up better than she was brought up herself.”