“Now you are at it!” cried Oliver gleefully. “Go to it!”
“Excuse me,” I objected; “we haven’t heard Cornelia’s point of view yet. I was about to say, when Willys broke in, that we educators don’t attach any great importance to the opinions of disillusioned politicians and satirical novelists—cynics like you and Willys. The national culture is in process of fundamental change and regeneration; and you belong to an order that will soon be obsolete, with none to mourn its extinction. The future of the country is in the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of prohibition as His Excellency’s wife. In that capacity I doubt if you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior’s mother. Won’t you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted?”
A hint of rose—pride or some deeper emotion—appeared in Cornelia’s face when I mentioned her son. He is her religion—the substance of it. Her husband is the church which she attends from old habit, repeating her belief in him with her lips, like the phrases of an ancient creed. But what she really believes in, with a fervor of prayer and faith, is her son. I suspected that Willys and Oliver would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, “so foreign and yet so domestic.” Somehow children seem out of place when one is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the guard of a woman who says, “My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver’s wife!” one must risk bad taste. Cornelia’s voice glided softly from gay to grave as she answered:—
“I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn’t much to relinquish, is it?—compared with what one has to relinquish.”
When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well, just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table only, “You’ve relinquished nothing!” But she completely ignored me and continued:—
“As my son’s mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to know that he doesn’t drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of conscience. Besides, he is too young. In my own home the boys had a glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family celebration. And the girls—I can’t remember that I tasted wine, except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen. If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere, simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social festivity.”
“Bravo!” cried Willys.
“But, alas,” she concluded, “all that is gone now. And it’s all so furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls, at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it’s odious, just odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it all adieu.”
“Admirable speech!” cried the novelist, as the Caribbean attendant refilled his glasses. “Beautiful speech: full of sweet reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical melancholy. ‘Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?’ You look too steadily on the small dark side of the question. There is a soul of goodness in things evil. Watch and wait! I maintain that the prohibitionists builded better than they knew: they have driven drinking out of the barroom and are bringing it back to the home, where it belongs, and where as Burke says—doesn’t he?—it loses all its evil by losing all its grossness, or something like that. You and His Excellency are performing a service to posterity by preserving through this destructive period the purity of a fine old tradition.”