“When I was eighteen I seemed to know quite a lot about girls of eighteen, but now I feel like a cow when Consuelo looks at me with her brown eyes, and my conversation with her degenerates into asking her a series of questions, like that dancing-skiing business. It is simply extraordinary, you know, how little one seems to know about what goes on inside girls of eighteen, and I think something ought to be done about it. I mean, one simply can’t go on living one’s whole life knowing nothing at all about girls of eighteen but pretending to know a whole lot about women of thirty who, on the other hand, know a good deal less than they think they do about chaps. This girl, though, is not at all a typical specimen, she can’t be, for (a) she is so amazingly well-dressed, (b) she has travelled a good deal, and (c) she ran away two years ago from Heathfield, by the simple expedient of climbing the school wall at six o’clock in the evening, hailing a passing motor-lorry on the Ascot Road, and so to London and to the home not far from Leicester. And here she is now, like a flower out of season among all these elderly people, who keep on saying that they don’t play bridge for money but that a shilling-a-hundred _does_ lend a zest to the game. I can’t help wanting, you know, to find out what she thinks of things _now_. It won’t be in the least interesting to find out what she thinks of things when she is in her twenties, for her fascinating kind of beauty--you want to pass your hand over it, that kind--can’t help spoiling her, the mere daily business of refusing proposals of marriage can’t help spoiling her--but _now_! Well, those brown eyes are the devil’s own barrier, and she’s so infernally simple that one has to talk intelligibly about everything, which is a habit one has almost gotten out of ever since one grew up and lived among grown-up people. Do girls of eighteen, does Consuelo, _know any_thing? I mean, does she know anything of the beauties and the dirts that men and women do to each other in the ordinary course of things, men and women being what they are and life being what it is? Or does Consuelo--she allowed me to call her that, by the way, by pulling a face when I Miss Browned her--does Consuelo, with her slim, brown, enchanting, touchable loveliness, know nothing about anything like that, does she think that young men admire only with their eyes and that therefore life is great fun? Or does she want them to admire her with something besides their eyes and their hearts and all the nice clean things? What does a girl of eighteen think about when she’s alone? Was Charles Garvice right or was Charles Garvice wrong?--I am serious--about the inner thoughts of a much admired girl of eighteen? Or are they more or less like boys? Do girls of eighteen--really nice ones, I mean, not the meretricious golden things one sees about London ballrooms in July with a tremendous air of having