Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/136

 at a hotel as husband and wife, the laws of this state would not recognize them as such."

"These are 'strong' topics," I said. "I don't think they are the only topics that girls with bobbed hair discuss, though they doubtless are discussed by girls with bobbed hair—and also by some girls whose hair reaches to their knees. But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia, is that life is full of strong topics. We can't get away from them or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of evils which every one knows exist. What I should try to ascertain, if I edged up to a group of 'modern' girls in conclave on these themes, is the point of view from which they were speaking—the amount of common sense which they were bringing to bear upon the vices and follies of their contemporaries."

Cornelia likes the ad hominem form of argument. "If you had a daughter of seventeen," she