see a cousin of mine, who's in one of the colleges there. She's going to
teach. She went up just before the war. Then she left to do some war
work, and now she's back again. She says nobody knows what to do with the
girls. All the old rules have just--_gone_!" The gesture of the small
hand was expressive. "Authority--means nothing. The girls are entering
for the sports--just like the men. They want to run the colleges--as they
please--and make all the rules themselves."

"Oh, I know--" broke in her companion. "They'll just allow the wretched
teachers and professors to teach--what their majesties choose to learn.
Otherwise--they run the show."

"Of course, they're awfully _nice_ girls--most of them," said Mrs.
Friend, with a little, puzzled wrinkling of the brow.

"Ripping! Done splendid war work and all that. But the older generation,
now that things have begun again, are jolly well up a tree--how to fit
the new to the old. I have some elderly relations at Oxbridge--a nice old
professor and his wife. Not stick-in-the-muds at all. But they tell me
the world there--where the young women are concerned--seems to be
standing on its head. Well!--as far as I can gather--I really know her
very slightly--my little cousin Helena's in just the same sort of stage.
All we people over forty might as well make our wills and have done with
it. They'll soon discover some kind device for putting us out of the way.
They've no use for us. And yet at the same time"--he flung his cigarette
into the wood-fire beside him--"the fathers and mothers who brought them
into the world will insist on clucking after them, or if they can't cluck
themselves, making other people cluck. I shall have to try and cluck
after Helena. It's absurd, and I shan't succeed, of course--how could I?
But as I told you, her mother was a dear woman--and--"