Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/147

Rh admitted that it had been a success, if you could call such things a success. But they weren't like the good old days of the Patriarchs and the Assemblies and The Howling Swells. The spirit of the times had changed, had lamentably changed, and the relationship of the sexes in the younger generation seemed disturbing to the survivors of the older era when a lady was accepted as a lady and treated as one. And from this diatribe on the degeneration of the present day Teddie's counsellor glided easily and eloquently into the advantages, for the girl of to-day, of early marriage and adequate guardianship. Every girl of spirit ought to marry. Even Teddie herself, he finally ventured, ought to marry.

"No young whippersnapper, mind you," discreetly qualified the old Commodore, "but some older and steadier man who knows the world and its ways, a man to be relied on in times of trouble, a man who'd be a harbor of refuge when the seas got to kicking up a bit!"

But this didn't seem to impress Teddie as he had hoped it would.