His wife is more suspicious, for she belongs to a generation of women that was ignorant and reveled in its ignorance and called it charm, a generation when all women were fools except the spitfires and the wits. She tends to think that she was "finished" as a lady; her daughters consider that she was done for. The grandmother is a little jealous, but the mother of to-day, the formed woman of about thirty-five, has made a great leap and resembles her children much more than she does her mother. Her offspring do not say: "What is home without a mother? Peace, perfect peace." She is a little too conscientious, perhaps; she has turned her back rather rudely upon her mother's pursuits, such as tea and scandal, and has taken too virulently to lectures or evolution and proteid. She is too vivid, like a newly painted railing, but, like the railing, she will tone down. She pretends to be very socialistic or very fast; on the whole she affects rather the fast style. We must not complain. Is not brown paint in the dining room worse than pink paint on the face? Whatever may be said about revolting daughters, I suspect that the change in the parent has been greater than that in the child, because the child in 1830 did not differ so much from the child of to-day as might appear. Youth then was restless and insurgent, just as it is to-day; only it was more effectively kept down. If to-day it is less kept down, this is partly for reasons I will indicate, but largely because the adult has changed. The patriarch is nearly dead; he is no longer the polygamous brute who ruled his wives with rods, murdered his infant sons, and sold his infant daughters; his successor, the knight of the Middle Ages, who locked up his wife in a tower for seven years while he crusaded in the Holy Land--he, too, has gone. And the merchant in broadcloth of Victorian days, who slept vigorously in the dining room on Sunday afternoon, has been replaced by a man who says he is sorry if told he snores. He is more liberal; he believes in reason now rather than in force, and generally would not contradict Milton's lines-- "Who overcomes by force Hath overcome but half his foe." He has come to desire love rather than power, and, little by little--thanks mainly to the "yellow" press--has acquired a chastened liking for new ideas. The spread of pleasure all round him, the vaudeville, the theaters, moving-picture shows, excursions to the seaside--all these have taught him that gaiety may not clash with respectability. Especially, he is more ready to argue, for a peaceful century has taught him that a word is better than a blow. There may be a change in his psychology after this war, for he is being educated by the million in the point of view that a loaded rifle is worth half a dozen scraps of paper; it is quite possible that he will carry this view into his social life. There may, therefore, be a reaction for thirty years or so, but thirty years is a trifle in questions such as these.