"Don't you see," she continued, as we came over the brow of a little hill, "why I can't have Dorothy reading these current novels? I don't wish her to be what this creature calls 'elemental' and 'spontaneous.' I wish her to be civilized and rational—and not a well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion or fancy or circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries, I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you know, that in the course of the last year I have met just one man in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a gentleman,—or rather, one man and his father,—I mean the hero of Struthers Burt's The Interpreter's House. As for Mr. Burt's women, they are almost as uncivilized as anybody's."
"Isn't there a season of life," I suggested, "in which almost everyone has some uncivilized promptings?"
"Is there a season in life," countered Cornelia,
