"Perhaps you WILL understand some day," her mother said, gently.
"Maybe you will when you've been married twenty-five years."

"You keep evading. Why don't you answer my question right
straight out?"

"There are questions you can't answer to young people, Alice."

"You mean because we're too young to understand the answer? I
don't see that at all. At twenty-two a girl's supposed to have
some intelligence, isn't she? And intelligence is the ability to
understand, isn't it? Why do I have to wait till I've lived with
a man twenty-five years to understand why you can't be tactful
with papa?"

"You may understand some things before that," Mrs. Adams said,
tremulously. "You may understand how you hurt me sometimes.
Youth can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time
you could understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it,
and wouldn't need to ask. You don't understand your father,
Alice; you don't know what it takes to change him when he's made
up his mind to be stubborn."

Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. "Well, I don't
think making scenes ever changes anybody," she grumbled. "I
think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself."

"'A little jolly persuasion!'" Her mother turned the echo of
this phrase into an ironic lament. "Yes, there was a time when I
thought that, too! It didn't work; that's all."