Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/171

 Willys and Oliver would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, "so foreign and yet so domestic." Somehow children seem out of place when one is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the guard of a woman who says, "My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver's wife!" one must risk bad taste. Cornelia's voice glided softly from gay to grave as she answered:—

"I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn't much to relinquish, is it?—compared with what one has to relinquish."

When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well, just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table only, "You've relinquished nothing!" But she completely ignored me and continued:—

"As my son's mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to know that he doesn't drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of conscience. Besides, he is too