things!"

"Like what?" asked Mr. Mavering, with the unserious interest which Mrs.
Primer made most people feel in her talk.

"Oh; it's too vast a subject. But they tell you about charming girls
moping the whole evening through at Boston parties, with no young men to
talk with, and sitting from the beginning to the end of an assembly and
not going on the floor once. They say that unless a girl fairly throws
herself at the young men's heads she isn't noticed. It's this terrible
disproportion of the sexes that's at the root of it, I suppose; it
reverses everything. There aren't enough young men to go half round, and
they know it, and take advantage of it. I suppose it began in the war."

He laughed, and, "I should think," he said, laying hold of a single
idea out of several which she had presented, "that there would always be
enough young men in Cambridge to go round."

Mrs. Pasmer gave a little cry. "In Cambridge!"

"Yes; when I was in college our superiority was entirely numerical."

"But that's all passed long ago, from what I hear," retorted Mrs.
Pasmer. "I know very well that it used to be thought a great advantage
for a girl to be brought up in Cambridge, because it gave her
independence and ease of manner to have so many young men attentive
to her. But they say the students all go into Boston now, and if the
Cambridge girls want to meet them, they have to go there too. Oh, I
assure you that, from what I hear, they've changed all that since our
time, Mr. Mavering."

Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she
would have approved of in another. The result was apparent in the
jocosity of this heavy Mr. Mavering's reply.

"Well, then, I'm glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked
generation. But I presume that unnatural supremacy of the young men is
brought low, so to speak, after marriage?"

Mrs. Primer let herself go a little further. "Oh, give us an equal
chance," she laughed, "and we can always take care of ourselves, and
something more. They say," she added, "that the young married women now
have all the attention that girls could wish."

"H'm!" said Mr. Mavering, frowning. "I think I should be tempted to box
my boy's ears if I saw him paying another man's wife attention."

"What a Roman father!" cried Mrs. Pasmer, greatly amused, and letting
herself go a little further yet. She said to herself that she really
must find out who this remarkable Mr. Mavering was, and she