t to go in a set."

"I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen--?
But I will talk to her...."

(10)

All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.

The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.

He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in
his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
hand holding her sprained wrist.

"Well," he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into
her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the
firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she
had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of
the same willowy type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and
she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight
brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in
adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice
she spoke like one who is under her own control.

"Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself," she began.

"No," said the bishop, weighing it. "No. But you seem to have been
indiscreet, little Norah."

"I got excited," she said. "They began turning out the other
women--roughly. I was indignant."

"You didn't go to interrupt?" he asked.

She considered. "No," she said. "But I went."

He liked her disposition to get it right. "On that side," he assisted.

"It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy," she said.

"And then things happened?"

"Yes," she said to the fire.

A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would
have said, "That is my case, my lord." The bishop prepared to open the
next stage in the proceedings.

"I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all," he said.

"Mother says that."

"A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit
more than yourself when you commit an indiscreti