Mrs.Peniston disliked scenes, and her determination to avoid them had always led her to hold herself aloof from the details of Lily's life.

In her youth, girls had not been supposed to require close supervision.

They were generally assumed to be taken up with the legitimate business of courtship and marriage, and interference in such affairs on the part of their natural guardians was considered as unwarrantable as a spectator's suddenly joining in a game.

There had of course been "fast" girls even in Mrs.
Peniston's early experience; but their fastness, at worst, was understood to be a mere excess of animal spirits, against which there could be no graver charge than that of being "unladylike." The modern fastness appeared synonymous with immorality, and the mere idea of immorality was as offensive to Mrs.Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing-room: it was one of the conceptions her mind refused to admit.
She had no immediate intention of repeating to Lily what she had heard, or even of trying to ascertain its truth by means of discreet interrogation.

To do so might be to provoke a scene; and a scene, in the shaken state of Mrs.Peniston's nerves, with the effects of her dinner not worn off, and her mind still tremulous with new impressions, was a risk she deemed it her duty to avoid.