“What nonsense!” cried Cornelia. “What perfect nonsense! Give it to me.” And almost snatching the letter from my hand, she tore it into fine shreds, and tossed it showering into a wild currant bush.
III
PREREQUISITES OF A DECENT MARRIAGE
“Don’t you see,” she continued, as we came over the brow of a little hill, “why I can’t have Dorothy reading these current novels? I don’t wish her to be what this creature calls ‘elemental’ and ‘spontaneous.’ I wish her to be civilized and rational—and not a well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion or fancy or circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries, I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you know, that in the course of the last year I have met just one man in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a gentleman,—or rather, one man and his father,—I mean the hero of Struthers Burt’s The Interpreter’s House. As for Mr. Burt’s women, they are almost as uncivilized as anybody’s.”
“Isn’t there a season of life,” I suggested, “in which almost everyone has some uncivilized promptings?”
“Is there a season in life,” countered Cornelia, “when a properly trained person cannot present at least the appearance of discretion?”
“My dear Cornelia,” I said, “do you ever glance through those columns in our great national fireside magazines, in which wise old editors converse with their contributors and advise young girls how to catch a man?”
Cornelia smiled, and then abruptly became very firm and grave. “That is it,” she said. “That is exactly it—‘how to catch a man’! And the dreadful thing is that the tone of our entire popular discussion and our popular literature is just about at that level—as if the mere possession of anything in the shape of a man were so unquestionably desirable that no scruple must be raised regarding his family and social position, his religion and principles of personal conduct, his property and prospects and professional standing. We are becoming absurd in our carelessness about such matters.”
“But that,” I protested, “is just what makes the beauty of life in America.”
“That,” said Cornelia, “is what makes American life so ugly—no respect for any of the things that make people respectable, no sense for the substantial basis of social distinctions, no regard for the hedges and barriers behind which one tries to cultivate the flowers of a finer garden.”
“That,” I said, “is the really decisive evidence of our freedom from snobbishness.”