Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/128

 buckler of knowingness, and the whole armor of sophistication. And I've decided to turn over a new leaf and meet my children halfway. Treat them like equals, instead of like superior beings. Dorothy will learn to smoke next fall, when she goes to college. It may be the only useful thing she will ever learn there. Qui sait? But if she waits till then, she will learn with a parcel of silly goslings who will think it is devilish. Let's try the effect of having her begin now at the domestic fireside with her own father and mother, who don't think it devilish."

I could seem to see a certain reckless experimental method in Oliver's madness—as in the serious proposal of some other reformers for "communal bathing" in the household, as an antidote to precocious sexual curiosity. It was an experiment which I should be willing to have tried on a dog. It had something in common, indeed, with an undeveloped notion of my own on the use of moral antitoxins. But I could also see that Cornelia saw nothing of the sort. So I merely asked, "And what did you say?"

"I said," she replied, "that Dorothy's mother did think it devilish—that Dorothy had never seen her mother smoking and never would. He