the following evening, we couldn't--we had a headache and the gnats were
about. So, although I often yearn to live _two_ lives--one full of
travel and adventure, and the other peacefully over the fireside mid the
peace and beauty of the country--I am quite sure that, were my wish
granted, I should find both lives just the same mixture of unexpected
happiness and unanticipated disappointment which I find this one to be,
yet still go smiling on. Very rarely the Time and the Place and the
Mood. But when they do happen to come together--well, life is so
wonderful and so beautiful that to throw in the "Loved one" too would
seem like gilding the rose--a heaven worth sacrificing every stolen
happiness in life for.

_When?_

One of the greatest--perhaps _the_ greatest--problems which parents have
to face is--when to tell their children the truth about sexual life; how
to tell it; how little to tell--how much. And most parents, alas! are
content to drift--to trust to luck! They themselves have got through
fairly well; the probabilities are, then, that their children will get
through fairly well too. So they, metaphorically speaking, fold their
hands and listen, and, when any part of the truth breaks through the
reticence of intimate conversation, they shake their heads solemnly,
strive to look shocked--and often are; or else they make a joke of
it--believing that their children regard the question in the same
reasonable light as they do themselves. But ignorance is never
reasonable, and half ignorance is even more excited. There is a
"mystery" somewhere, and ignorant youth is hot after its solution. And
the "mystery" is solved for them in a dozen ways--all more or less dirty
and untrue. Better far be too frank, so long as your frankness isn't the
frankness of coarse levity, than not to be frank enough. The reticence
of parents towards their children in this matter has turned many a young
life of brilliant promise into a life-long hell. We don't _see_ this
hell for the most part, and, because we don't see it, we fondly believe
that it does not exist--or, if it does exist, that it exists so rarely as
scarcely to demand more than a passing condemnation and a sigh. We hear
a great deal about the Hidden Plague. We hear of the 80,000 cases of
syphilis which are registered every year in the United Kingdom. But we
don't know any individual sufferer--or we _think_ we don't; and so,
although we take the figure as a