Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/19

 porary youth. Beauty is still 'all right.' But the quality of 'sweetness,' though it is not yet wholly unmarketable, is held in greatly diminished esteem. And as for purity—'What is purity?' asks the jesting younger generation, and will not stay for an answer."

"Young people ask many foolish questions," said Cornelia dismissively. "What troubles me is rather the changing attitude of so many parents and teachers. Have they lost that beautiful desire to shield the years of innocence? Have they quite lost their sense of responsibility?"

"No," I conjectured, "they haven't altogether lost their sense of responsibility. But they haven't known quite what to do with it; and just now it seems temporarily to have slipped from their hands. They didn't know how to use it when they had it; or they were afraid to use it, and cast the responsibility for the innocence of their children upon God; and now the children, sick of that evasion, are acting for themselves. And I am afraid that we have rather lost contact with the younger generation. It has experienced so much, it has read so much, it is so accustomed to the free discussion of all sorts of topics which we thought ominous even to mention—that I often suspect