case from her and threw them into the fireplace."
"If you take the jest seriously," I said, "I don't blame you for being perturbed. I haven't any clear moral principle on this point. Many girls do smoke; and I think we shall ultimately have to concede that smoking isn't a 'sex function.' But smoking and Dorothy don't go together, in my feeling for the fitness of things. It seems like offering snuff to Viola or a Manila cigar to Rosalind. (You ought not to forget, by the way, that those two girls did wear knickers.) But smoking—why, I should as soon think of offering a plug of tobacco to you, Cornelia."
"Ugh! Don't be disgusting," she pleaded.
"I'm not disgusting. I am only expressing my sense of the immeasurable gulf that lies between you and anything of questionable taste. But go on with your story."
"Well, Oliver arrived that night. When I asked him what he meant by the performance, he laughed in that infectious, irresistibly disarming way he has, and said, 'Oh, I have been reading Heywood Broun on the care and nurture of children. The young man has ideas. He thinks the way to equip youth for the battle of life is to gird upon them the sword of early experience, the
