Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/18

 continued, "is grave. It is very grave to those of us who have boys and girls of eighteen and twenty. We wish them in these formative years to be subject only to the finest influences. How can they be, when they read such books? How can any one who is interested in moulding the characters of the younger generation not desire to keep such books as you know they are reading out of their hands? When I think of my son or my daughter, with their clean sweet young minds, wading into the filth of our popular fiction, I repeat to myself those lines of Heine—you remember:—

"Try it," I suggested with studious brutality. "Call in the children. Lay your hands on their heads, and pray that God may keep them in their beauty and purity and sweetness. How will they take it? Demurely, I fancy—while they are in your presence. But when they meet in the garden afterward, they will exclaim, 'Isn't mother an old dear!' And then they will laugh softly, and think of—all sorts of things. Heine's prayer, you know, doesn't hit off the aspirations of contem-