“Professor,” I said, “your words are soothing. They are alluringly optimistic. I don’t want to reform the American child. I like him--and especially her--as at present conditioned. I believe that the irreverence is largely a seeming irreverence--an irreverence toward traditions rather than toward people and principles; which simply is saying what we should say of grown-up Americans. And I believe that in any case the boy will knock his way out somehow. But the girl--I am not doubting her; I am not believing that she is so petted a darling as Paul Bourget, for instance, seems to think she is. I am not questioning the intrinsic charm of her style, the piquing prophecies of her mind, the perfection of her beauty, the delight of her companionship; I am wondering whether this immediately agreeable sort of product is going to meet the requirements of life as it is opening up to us in this land, if--” “Well,” swung in the Professor, “if you were going to have a worry, it is a pity you couldn’t have had a new one--the new ones keep us busy enough. You are very trite this time. You sound like a reformer--” “Heaven forbid!” I cried. “--and a reformer nowadays has a passion for beginning on the children. Please don’t. Some of these reforming women remind me of the advertisement in the London paper: ‘Bulldog for sale. Will eat anything. Very fond of children.’ These reforming women will reform anything--and they are very fond of children.” “It is particularly the American girl,” I went on, “who is illustrating the modern yearning to skip intervals, to ignore the ordinary processes of time. She is like Horace Walpole, who found that the deliberation with which trees grow was ‘extremely inconvenient to his natural impatience.’ It doesn’t seem to make any difference how rigidly her ‘coming out’ time is fixed, she is getting to be a woman before her time. Mark me, Professor, she knows too much, she--” “A strictly masculine anxiety, sir.” “--she knows too much, to the exclusion of some other things she doesn’t know.” [Illustration] “Now _don’t_ mention the kitchen,” cried the Professor, “I am dreadfully tired of that.” “No, Professor, her general cleverness always seems to me to make the kitchen anxiety needless to a great extent. I mean that in knowing so much and assuming so much the American girl child may be missing some of that sweetness that for her lies in a more old-fashioned girlhood. As a kind of unbent twig she is losing some of the more dependent happiness belonging to her and not grudged to her. Mind you, Professor, if a crime has been committed, I am accessory--” “I began with that assumption,” remarked the Professor.