“I read the book. It of course interested me; if it hadn’t I should not have finished it. Now listen, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, to an old woman and try to realize where she rises intellectually above you both. To Mr. Smith the book is out of the question, impossible. To Mr. Jones it is an important, perhaps a great study of certain phases of contemporary life. Neither of you will concede an inch, and neither of you seem to be aware of the fact that the interest of the book does not consist in its frankness of phrase, in its matter-of-fact acceptance of unconventionality. What the story crystallizes, in a fashion that will make the average middle-aged parent sit up and gasp, is the tragic impossibility of a parent comprehending and sympathizing with its own offspring. As you know, I have long been a mother of grown-up children, and my family is remarkably ‘united,’ as the saying is; but if you take your courage in your hands, open wide your eyes and honestly, pitilessly examine almost any family however theoretically, technically ‘united,’ what do you discover? I am not talking of the idealist and the sentimentalist. I am referring to cool and calm investigators like, let us say, this man Wells you both have been talking about. He has examined a certain family. It is just one small family, but the writer has succeeded to an astonishing degree in typifying the modern family in general, although to admit that he has may be repellent. “The world,” declared Mrs. Robinson, “is moving with a rather frightening, breath-taking rapidity. Even parents, comparatively young, no longer live the lives of their children. I’m not such an old fool as to believe for a moment that I know what my boys are doing or what my girls are thinking. I used to consider it possible; I now am convinced that it is impossible. Such character as I have developed and solidified, I achieved under circumstances that do not now obtain, although I tried, wrongly perhaps, to keep them up, to prolong them and make them influences in the lives of the beings for whom I am responsible. My greatest claim to modernity consists in the fact that I have gracefully recognized and accepted defeat. My children are my children, but they also are children of a period in the world’s history to which I really do not in a heartfelt way belong. This in many respects is sad, it is even at times horrible. But here we are! What are we going to do about it? Ann Veronica belonged violently to her time. Her father belonged tenaciously to his. To preserve a united family, what, given these conditions, must happen? Simply concessions. To preserve the happy family, Ann must always forfeit some of her intelligence and modernity; Papa and Mamma must always concede to--oh, all sorts of little things (sometimes they are dreadfully big things) that they abominate. Parents and children have to scare up a kind of domestic philosophy and meet one another half way. When they don’t there is no longer a ‘united’ family.