at the teas which the girls used to give. Like as not, she could tell her mother a few things!
“There are certain subjects which are discussed all too freely nowadays,” Mrs. Loamford continued, “—things which a mother ought to tell her daughter rather than let her get wrong information from her friends. Perhaps you don’t know it, Dorothy, but I’ve been making a study of these matters lately just so that I could tell you about them as a mother should.”
“I know about—those things,’ Dorothy volunteered.
Her mother looked horrified.
“What! Idle talk and stories—that’s all,” she commented severely.
She had prepared herself for this occasion, and she would deliver herself, even though Dorothy were as well informed as Dr. Freud.
“When you were a very little girl,’ she continued sternly, “I told you about yourself—you remmeber that?”
Dorothy remembered the event. Her mother had come home from a parents’ meeting and talked endlessly about the digestive system, the brain, the heart, the lungs and what she had called “the more intimate details.”
“You know of course,” Mrs. Loamford went on, warming up to her subject, “that the male body is not exactly like yours. You remember how I used to explain to you in the country how the flowers reproduced. How the pollen was carried and all that. I think that you should know, now that you are going out in the world, how human life is created.”
How simple did her mother think she was?
“I know, mother,” said Dorothy. “We had lectures on sex hygiene in biology class.”
Mrs. Loamford blushed at the word “sex.” Young girls didn’t care what they said nowadays!
[56]
