Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/119

 to the conceptions of the good and the beautiful which she inherits from several generations of ancestors accustomed to giving the tone to the society in which they lived. It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia at present as a grande dame—she is too young, there is too much of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her grandchildren—what people call a grande dame.

But the tide of democratic vulgarity is running into the country havens and stealing insidiously into the securest retreats. One's own friends and neighbors are tainted with it. One's own husband brings a whiff of it up from the city at the week-end. One's own children, in spite of all segregation and antiseptic precautions, show a mild infection with it in their speech, in their manners, and even in their tastes. One doesn't compromise with it. One "stands firm"; but one stands ever more and more alone.