"And have all the men afraid of you, for fear they'll be responsible for teaching you something," explains one practical miss. "Men like to find you in stock, ready-taught. We know how to take care of ourselves--so we let them think what they want." In short, the whole new game, as the earnest disciple from the half generation ago learned it, is not to reveal the dark secret that you abide by the Ten Commandments. Man must not suspect that you are unattainable. He must just think that he has not attained you--yet. If you want to compete with the flappers, you've got to play by the flapper rules. Check your conversational inhibitions! And if by chance there be any inhibitions left over, Prohibition has obligingly introduced new opportunities for privacy, that will help you check them too. When a couple strays off now from group formation, there's a perfectly good alibi available of finding a sheltered spot for a drink. Where once it really wasn't good form to go to a man's hotel room, now it is the national custom for the owner of hootch to register a casket for his jewel--and then invite the young things in, one by one. A flapper these nights can retire to that hotel bedroom for an hour in the middle of a dance. The girl is not "talked about," and the place is not "pulled." Even the house detective knows that she is innocently drinking a drink. Thus has this rebel young generation forced out into the open country with it all the contented young women in their late twenties and early thirties, who may not have been feeling rebellious at all. And the wives of forty-five also, to compete all over again for their own husbands. For "poaching" on the wifely preserves has become the favorite flapper sport! "Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring us back to normalcy. Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself worth her salt unless all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand and competed with the young blades for her quadrilles. But when black persons stopped buttoning up the shoes of the Quality, America entered upon her 1870's, her sombre brown stone fronts, and her cloistered husbands. The money for doing society had simply passed into the hands of the descendants of Miles Standish and Priscilla, who carried their consciences into their sober mansions with them. The Age of Innocence was upon us, and has clung close ever since.