.

.

And you have just asked me whether a young girl is interesting to me.

I answer, yes, thank God!--for the cleaner, saner, happier hours I have spent this winter among my own kind have been spent where the younger set dominated.
"They are good for us, Nina; they are the hope of our own kind--well-taught, well-drilled, wholesome even when negative in mind; and they come into our world so diffident yet so charmingly eager, so finished yet so unspoiled, that--how can they fail to touch a man and key him to his best?
How can they fail to arouse in us the best of sympathy, of chivalry, of anxious solicitude lest they become some day as we are and stare at life out of the faded eyes of knowledge!" He laid his hands in hers, smiling a little at his own earnestness.
"Alarmist?
No! The younger set are better than those who bred them; and if, in time, they, too, fall short, they will not fall as far as their parents.

And, in their turn, when they look around them at the younger set whom they have taught in the light and wisdom of their own shortcomings, they will see fresher, sweeter, lovelier young people than we see now.