"You know it's very nice and luxurious to be here like this and have tea brought to me. Now tell me about this evening; what did Roger say?" "He was delighted," said Mary. "He says he can get away fairly early from the office, and he'll get the tickets on the way home. And he asked me to give you his love and ask what it was you were celebrating?" Mrs. Greene's heart missed a beat. She felt that she could hardly say, "I'm celebrating my death sentence," and yet the melodramatic little phrase nearly escaped her. She hesitated for a second and then said quite naturally: "We're celebrating the very good news you told me this morning, my dear Mary. I'm very happy about it; I shall enjoy having a grand-nephew." Mary's face glowed with pleasure. "I never thought you'd be so pleased. Would you like us to call him Hugh if he's a boy?" Sarah Greene took her hand and held it for a moment. "It's kind of you to think of it," she said, "but no, Mary, I don't really think I'd like it. I've never quite believed in calling children after people; it doesn't seem to me to mean very much; I'd rather you just called your boy any name you liked." "I had thought of Roger, but I'm not sure." "Well, don't be influenced by anyone; just decide what name you like and keep to it. It's only a convention to name children after their relations, and I don't quite believe in conventions that are based on sentiment. Perhaps we get harder as we get older; I'm not sure. But it seems to me that my generation has a good deal in common with yours. We were very differently brought up, of course, but we arrived at rather the same conclusions as you young people have now: a distaste for anything too easy, or flabby, as you might call it." She turned questioningly to Mary, who reflected for a moment in the struggle to assemble her thoughts. "I know what you mean," she said at last. "I do feel we've much more in common with people of your age than people about forty-five or fifty. We're harder than they are, and we take things in our stride like your generation did. I always think you were awfully brave. And we're a greedy generation, but I don't think we're greedy in such a soft way as middle-aged people are." She stopped again to think, and then added: "Your generation doesn't strike me as being greedy at all. You were all so awfully good at self-sacrifice." Mrs. Greene laughed. "My dear Mary," she expostulated, "that sounds terrible--as if we were all would-be martyrs. Yes, indeed, we were just as greedy as you are, but we wanted different things, and I think we very often wanted them for other people. As wives, we were contented to be a good deal in the background; we liked our husbands to shine and we didn't need so much personal success as women do nowadays. But it wasn't so very different after all; I know you want things for Roger more than for yourself, for instance."