And he held her sobbing in his strong arms, as his hand still stroked her hair and his lips again bent until they touched her fair white brow in fierce and passionate caress.
Chapter Twenty Eight.
Describes certain Curious Events.
Has it never struck you that this twentieth century of ours is the essential age of the very young girl?
Supreme to-day reigns the young woman between the age of—well say from sixteen to twenty—who dresses her hair with a parting and a pigtail, wears short skirts, displays a neat ankle, and persists in remaining in her teens. Grumpy old fossils tell us that this species is a product of an advanced state of civilisation which insists that everything must be new, from a dish of pèches à la Melba to the tint of that eternal hoarding in front of Buckingham Palace. One can only suppose that they are correct. Ours is a go-ahead age which scoffs at the horse, and pokes fun at the South-Eastern Railway, which forsakes Saturday concerts for football, yet delights in talking-machines.
Is it any wonder therefore that the statuesque beauty and the skittish matron of a year ago no longer finds herself in demand for supper-parties, Sandown or Henley? No, she must nowadays stand aside, and watch the reign of her little sister who dashes off from the theatre to the Savoy in a motor-brougham still wearing her ribbon bow on her pigtail, much as she did in the schoolroom.
The young of certain species of wild fowl are termed “flappers,” and some irreverent and irascible old gentleman has applied that term to the go-ahead young miss of to-day. Though most women over twenty-one may attempt to disguise the fact, it is plain that the young girl just escaped from the schoolroom now reigns supreme. Her dynasty is at its zenith. She is the ruling factor of London life. Peers of the realm, foreign potentates, hard-bitten soldiers from the East, magnates from Park Lane all hurry to her beck and call. The girl in the pigtail and short skirt rides over them all roughshod. And what is the result of all this adulation upon the dimple-faced little girl herself? In the majority of cases, I fear it results in making her a stuck-up, blasé and conceited little prig, for she nowadays takes upon herself a glory and exalted position to which she is entirely unsuited, but which she has been taught to consider hers by right.
Gwen Griffin was a perfect type of the very young girl, courted, petted and flattered by all the men of her acquaintance. Having no mother to forbid her, she was fond of going motor-rides and fond of flirtation, but through it all she had, fortunately, never developed any of those objectionable traits so common in girls of her age. She had managed to remain quite simple, sweet and unaffected through it all, and six months before, when she had found the man she could honestly love, she had cut her male friends and entered upon life with all seriousness.