"At thirty-five she was a woman, strong, courageous, intelligent, a brilliant conversationalist"—in fact, a popular Society Queen. Her "existence had been an orgy of sensation." Then the boy, Gerald, came into her life. He had a "wonderful" mother: "There's nothing I would not tell her, nothing that we do not talk over." It was his plan, and hers, for him not to marry "for ages, not for ten years, if then. You see, I want to make my castle first. Then I will ask someone to live in it. I want to give my wife everything. I want to stick her up in the public view and just arrange things for her quietly." _But_ his mother was "broad-minded." When "she sees a woman obviously happy, she feels that she probably has a lover." She "wouldn't want all the best" of her son's life. "She knows I don't mean to marry, and she knows also that no man goes very far without a woman in his life." And, _not_ "necessarily, in the background. I can imagine a very great friendship developing into something more passionate while one was young and impulsive, and then slipping gradually back into a wonderful comradeship." "And," he added, "I should never marry a woman who would mind my having _friends_!" All this he tells Corona—"very quietly and simply"; and then, "kissing her face swiftly, hotly, . . . till she bit him"; with incredible _naivete_, explains that he had talked about her with his mother—"She feels I should be safe with you" and "she would be a good friend to my mistress." In her first blaze of anger and scorn Corona spits out: "I suppose Sir Henry is your mother's lover"; and the boy cries, "No, he is not! How dare you suggest it? _My mother is much too fine a woman to have a lover._ She never had one and never will have." This is the truth none can escape: the one answer possible for any decent boy: the inspiration of all the youth of all ages, who have made for us a fair world, illumined by faith, courage, and hope. XI HAVE WE ALREADY FORGOTTEN THE NATURAL LOYALTY OF YOUTH. HOW ARE WE PAYING—OUR DEBT TO THEM? Honour the dead, care for those who saved the homes: for, as we have here striven to show, never before has youth been in such dire need of sympathy, understanding, and help. Too soon we forget that war blasts humanity, a state of war makes us all brutes, degrades every man, woman, and child, in every part of their nature, for all hours of their lives. Youth, indeed, was rudderless through no fault of its own and, when least prepared, most needing a clear vision, it has been tossed into such a medley of mad notions as never before deluded mankind.