“Of course,” she replied. “If there were real occasion for it, I should despise him if he were not the first to risk his life. But he does it now—and these other things, I am convinced—mainly because he knows how much I dislike them. I don’t see what possesses him.”
“What other things does he do, Cornelia? Oliver is at one of the ‘dangerous ages.’ And perhaps his children are beginning to influence him. You mustn’t forget that Dorothy and Oliver Junior have reached an age at which offspring frequently have a very unsettling effect upon their parents.”
“Well, listen. You know how much I dislike what people call ‘the modern girl’ and all her works and ways?”
“Yes.”
“And you know how hard I have tried to keep Dorothy in her old-fashioned sweetness and innocence?”
“I don’t see what there is old-fashioned in Dorothy,” I said. “But she is sweet. I supposed God had made her so, and that the work couldn’t easily be changed, and that all you had to do was to stand aside and watch her blossoming. But since you say that has been a trial, I must believe that you have been tried by it.”
“Yes, and so does Oliver—I mean, he knows perfectly that it isn’t easy for me to keep the right influences here and the wrong ones away. But what do you suppose occurred to him as the most appropriate birthday present that he could send up here by express to his daughter, the day before he came last week? An expensive knicker-outfit, a handsome cigarette-case, and a big package of his own cigarettes.”
“Oliver has to have his little jest.”
“Little jest, indeed!” retorted Cornelia almost grimly. “When Dorothy opened the bundle, of course I supposed that Oliver had enclosed the cigarettes for his own use. But Dorothy said, ‘No, mother, they are for me. Father promised them to me on my birthday.’ She opened the box, and there was a poem from Oliver, addressed, ‘To my daughter Dorothy with her first box of cigarettes,’ with a lot of rigmarole warning her against the excess of smoking more than one at a time! I thought he had gone crazy, and I was so angry that I snatched the cigarettes and the case from her and threw them into the fireplace.”
“If you take the jest seriously,” I said, “I don’t blame you for being perturbed. I haven’t any clear moral principle on this point. Many girls do smoke; and I think we shall ultimately have to concede that smoking isn’t a ‘sex function.’ But smoking and Dorothy don’t go together, in my feeling for the fitness of things. It seems like offering snuff to Viola or a Manila cigar to Rosalind. (You ought not to forget, by the way, that those two girls did wear knickers.) But smoking—why, I should as soon think of offering a plug of tobacco to you, Cornelia.”