“Anyhow, the girls’ schools are wrong,” retorted Uncle. “Get at the inner workings of those institutions, and you find one or two brats of the Nouveaux Riches, at the head of the strongest clique, making life hell for the other girls, who won’t toady to them. The result is the school becomes a breeding ground for the society ‘bug’, as we have it in America. The rich girls have the biggest hampers, extravagant clothes, the most money to spend; and are encouraged to show off to the full. The girls’ school is the nursery-bed of worldliness.”
“And the boys’ schools?” asked Mumsie.
“Much the same: the natural cad once he enters a fraternity house, dons a smoking jacket, sticks a pipe in his mouth and thinks he is a superior being. The whole system—for boys and girls—is rotten and wrong.”
“I may say,” put in my fellow guest, “that close on the time I asked Miss Fashion if I might carry her golf-sticks I met a poor woman carrying a valise. I took it from her. She was grateful. The moral is that one may help the old and homely, but not the young and gay.”
“The old need help more than the strong,” said Uncle.
“That reminds me of the story of the Irishman in the street-car, who gave up his seat to a wizened old maid,” said Mumsie. “ ‘Thank you very much,’ said she. ‘Not at all, not at all,’ replied Paddy. ‘Some people they gets up only when a good-looking girl wants a seat, but I don’t, sez I to meself sez I, Pat, it’s the sex ye should honour, not the individual. Not at all mum, not at all’.”
The joke was new to me and I laughed. The men creatures brightened up too. So I gained new courage and asked: “The boys and girls of the old families,—what of them?”
“Ah, now, Elsie,” said Uncle, “you are touching upon the really sad phase of the question. The spectacle of the son or daughter of self-respecting people fawning on the vulgar-rich is unspeakably deplorable, and, unfortunately, becoming more common day by day.”
“Agreed, Uncle,” cried Mr. Bang, “and even more apparent in conservative old England.”
“The kingdom of the mind,—that’s putting it briefly—weakens before the spell of the motor and the dizzy whirl,” continued Uncle.