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 much. But it’s kind of nice, being young in this generation.”

“Surely. We all think that, when our arteries begin to harden,” the Semitic man rejoined. “Not only are most of our sins vicarious, but most of our pleasures are too. Look at our books, our stage, the movies. Who supports ’em? Not the young folks. They’d rather walk around or just sit and hold each other’s hands.”

“It’s a substitute,” Fairchild said. “Don’t you see?”

“Substitute for what? When you are young and in love yesterday and out to-day and in again to-morrow, do you know anything about love? Is it anything to you except a rather dreadful mixture of jealousy and thwarted desires and interference with that man’s world which after all, we all prefer, and nagging and maybe a little pleasure like a drug? It’s not the women you sleep with that you remember, you know.”

“No, thank God,” Fairchild said. The other continued:

“It’s the old problem of the aristocracy over and over: a natural envy of that minority which is at liberty to commit all the sins which the majority cannot stop earning a living long enough to commit.” He lit his cigar again. “Young people always shape their lives as the preceding generation requires of them. I don’t mean exactly that they go to church when they are told to, for instance, because their elders expect it of them—though God only knows what other reason they could possibly have for going to church as it is conducted nowadays, with a warden to patrol the building in the urban localities and in the rural districts squads of K.K.K.’s beating the surrounding copses and all those traditional retreats that in the olden days enabled the church to produce a soul for every one it saved. But youth in general lives unquestioningly according to the arbitrary precepts of its elders.

“For instance, a generation ago higher education was not considered so essential, and young people grew up at home into