Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/129

 laughed again and said, 'Then she will never learn to do it like a lady.' I inquired whether he were incapable of distinguishing between what is permissible in a man, perhaps pardonable in his typist, and what is undesirable in his seventeen-year-old daughter. He reminded me that three fourths of the ladies he knows smoke, and that Russian women, French women, and English women can't understand why we make a moral issue of it. I said, 'So much the worse for them. I am sick of having something obviously bad in America excused merely because something obviously worse exists elsewhere.' He said, 'Cornelia, you are a Little American. You are out of step.' And I lost my temper, and exclaimed, 'Oliver, you are a great idiot! Dorothy hasn't smoked yet, and she wouldn't think of smoking now, if she hadn't a fool for a father.