“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and that's what makes the whole thing so perfectly ridiculous. Just think of two children, one of twenty and the other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in such a vital matter! Should we trust their judgment in regard to the smallest business affair? Of course not. They're babes in arms, morally and mentally speaking. People haven't the data for being wisely in love till they've reached the age when they haven't the least wish to be so. Oh, I suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty; I can look back and see that I did; and, what's more preposterous still, I thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four. But we were no more fit to accept or reject each other at that infantile period--” “Do you really think so?” asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of Mrs. Brinkley's irony. “Yes, it does seem out of all reason,” admitted Mrs. Stamwell. “Of course it is,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “If she has rejected him, she's done a very safe thing. Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty. Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved each other.” Miss Cotton reflected a moment. “It is strange that such an important question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far from mature. I never happened to look at it in that light before.” “Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley--and she made herself comfortable in an arm chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must pass--“but it's only part and parcel of the whole affair. I'm sure that no grown person can see the ridiculous young things--inexperienced, ignorant, featherbrained--that nature intrusts with children, their immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies, without rebelling at the whole system. When you see what most young mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the whole race doesn't teeth and die. Yes, there's one thing I feel pretty sure of--that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn't to be mothers at all, there ought to be only grandmothers.” The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first to become grave. At the bottom of her heart there was a doubt whether so light a way of treating serious things was not a little wicked. “Perhaps,” she said, “we shall have to go back to the idea that engagements and marriages are not intended to be regulated by the judgment, but by the affections.” “I don't know what's intended,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “but I know what is. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the affections have it their own way, and I must say I don't think the judgment could make a greater mess of it. In fact,” she continued, perhaps provoked to the excess by the deprecation she saw in Miss Cotton's eye, “I consider every broken engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise.” Miss Cotton said nothing. The other ladies said, “Why, Mrs. Brinkley!”