DARLING VIN,—It is dreadful, but father won’t hear of an engagement. He is so absurdly old-fashioned and does not realize that everything has changed. No doubt when he was your age, long ago in the eighteen-nineties, people could wait for each other; but why should we? I don’t suppose that then they even knew how to kiss. He says the most ridiculous things. He says that a girl ought to know a man at least for a year and that twenty-one is the earliest age at which she should marry. Why, Juliet was only about fourteen when she was betrothed to Romeo, and lots of Indian girls are widows before our hair is up. And what is the sense of love at first sight if you have to wait? Father also says that aviation is not a desirable profession for a son-in-law, entirely forgetting that half the fun of our marriage will be the flying honeymoon. I think you had better call on father boldly and have it out with him.—Your own J. LIV THEODORE RABY TO VERENA RABY DEAR OLD V.,—If Josey writes to you for sympathy in her struggle with a stern and heartless parent, please oblige me and help the little idiot (bless her, all the same!) by supporting me. These are the cold facts. She is eighteen and has been frivolling far too much, largely because she has no mother and I have been too much occupied to attend to her properly. Also because the War made frivolling too easy by fledging so many infants at lightning speed. Among the acquaintances that she has picked up at this and that _thé dansant_ is a flying boy, and, just because other boys and girls have married in haste, she must needs insist on marrying in haste too. No doubt she thinks herself in love and no doubt also he does, although I shouldn’t be surprised to find that he is more pursued than pursuing, as is so often the case now; but the whole thing is derivative really, and I can’t have my one little Precious thrown away on an experiment in imitation. The bore is that—to such a pass has the world come!—she might at any moment perform the Gretna Green act. Self-restraint, you see, is a little out of fashion up here: we all live for ourselves now, to the great detriment of the Human Family which peace was to consolidate. To forbid her to see the boy seems to me a mistake. If you were well I should ask you to invite her to the country, but you are not well, my poor dear, and she wouldn’t go even if you were—not so long as her warrior is accessible. And he seems to be always in town, the exceptional perils of the air being, it appears, compensated for by exceptional opportunities of leave.