r.
"What do you really think?" she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch
at the corner of the piazza where the group was seated.

"Oh, what does it matter, at their age?" she demanded.

"But they're just of the age when it does happen to matter," suggested
Mrs. Stamwell.

"Yes," said Mrs. Brinkley, "and that's what makes the whole thing so
perfectly ridiculous. Just think of two children, one of twenty and the
other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in
such a vital matter! Should we trust their judgment in regard to the
smallest business affair? Of course not. They're babes in arms, morally
and mentally speaking. People haven't the data for being wisely in love
till they've reached the age when they haven't the least wish to be so.
Oh, I suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty;
I can look back and see that I did; and, what's more preposterous still,
I thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four. But we were no more fit
to accept or reject each other at that infantile period--"

"Do you really think so?" asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of
Mrs. Brinkley's irony.

"Yes, it does seem out of all reason," admitted Mrs. Stamwell.

"Of course it is," said Mrs. Brinkley. "If she has rejected him, she's
done a very safe thing. Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty.
Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved
each other."

Miss Cotton reflected a moment. "It is strange that such an important
question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far
from mature. I never happened to look at it in that light before."

"Yes," said Mrs. Brinkley--and she made herself comfortable in an arm
chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must
pass--"but it's only part and parcel of the whole affair. I'm sure that
no grown person can see the ridiculous young things--inexperienced,
ignorant, featherbrained--that nature intrusts with children, their
immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies,
without rebelling at the whole system. When you see what most young
mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the
whole race doesn't teeth and die. Yes, there's one thing I feel pretty
sure of--that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn't to be mothers
at all, there ought to be only grandmothers."

The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first