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--" His sentence stopped abruptly.