Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/172

 young. In my own home the boys had a glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family celebration. And the girls—I can't remember that I tasted wine, except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen. If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere, simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social festivity."

"Bravo!" cried Willys.

"But, alas," she concluded, "all that is gone now. And it's all so furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls, at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it's odious, just odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it all adieu."

"Admirable speech!" cried the novelist, as the Caribbean attendant refilled his glasses. "Beautiful speech: full of sweet reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical