Amnesiacs -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Trials -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Cynthia's own group accepted her without enthusiasm or criticism.
She was regarded as one who was no obstructionist and who by sheer
triviality added much to the gayety of nations. Her "line" was
silliness. Long education by the sensational type of moving picture had
removed from these young people any morbid sensitiveness. "Cinny," and
"Cinema" as they called her, wanted to find out about morphine--let
her. "Fancy," so named from Frances, was a fine swimmer, always diving
against her mother's command. She had saved a child once--moral--if
Fancy hadn't disobeyed her mother she couldn't have saved the child!
Marjorie, who was fat and too evidently made up, was a good sport and
awfully nice at picnics and sailed a boat well and was jolly and fair
in all games. Gertrude, dubbed facetiously "the road-hog," had nearly
killed an old man by running over him in breaking speed laws; but this
fact instead of making her in any way taboo, only served to add to
her interest as a rather tragic saturnine young person in extremely
abbreviated skirts.
They were all far away from the tradition and early training of the
parents who had borne them, spent incalculable money on them, scoured
the realm for the best food for them; added to their youthful desires,
their green sloths, given them leisure and opportunity and crammed
them with diversion but neglected to set them an unswerving example of
strong, frank, fearless, reverent and purposeful life. The young people
of to-day analyzed like a sort of mischievous ivy or burdock burr,
growing rank in the pure garden of our purpose, have become what they
are merely by feeding on the soil around them. They are the curious
sports of a few rather shameful vines and fruits of our own negligence.
When they speak flippantly of love and marriage, they do so with a
very accurate knowledge of the percentage of divorces and the reasons
for these divorces. When they reveal all that is legally possible
of their fine young bodies, they do so after a war which placed the
highest percentage on physical superiority and challenged the needs for
privacy, and they do so impelled by frankness and a healthy Narcissism
that is much better than our old time reticence, our concealment of
deformity and weakness, our æsthetic half-revealing and suggesting that
made so strong a desire for full revelation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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