ou were very snappish and peevish with me just now, Conrad, without
waiting to hear what I had to say. But I overlook it. I am your
mother. If you had waited, I should have told you that I have no fault
whatever to find with Miss Nightingale's bathing-dress. It is, no
doubt, strictly _en regle_. Nor can I say, in these days, what I think
of girls practising exercises that in _my_ day were thought unwomanly.
All is changed now, and I am old-fashioned. But this I do say, that
had your father, or your great-uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, been told
forty years ago that a time would come when it would be thought no
disgrace for an _English girl_ to jump off a boat with an _unmarried
man_ in it.... My dear, I am sure the latter would have made one of
those acrid and biting remarks for which he was celebrated in his own
circle, and which have even, I believe, been repeated by Royalty. That
is the only thing I have to say. I say nothing of girls learning to
swim and dive. I say nothing of their bicycling. Possibly the young
lady who passed the window this morning with a gentleman _on the same
bicycle_ was properly engaged to him; or his sister. Even about the
practice of Sandow, or Japanese wrestling, I have nothing to say. But
if they are to dive off boats in the open sea, in the face of all the
beach, at least let the boats be rowed by married men. That is all
I ask. It is very little."

What fools mothers sometimes are about their sons! They contrive
that these sons shall pass through youth to early manhood without
a suspicion that even mothers have human weaknesses. Then, all in
a moment, just when love has ridden triumphant into the citadel of
the boys' souls, they will sacrifice all--all they have won in a
lifetime--to indulge some petty spleen against the new _regime_ that
threatens their dethronement. And there is no surer way of undermining
a son's loyalty than to suggest a want of delicate feeling in the new
Queen--nothing that can make him question the past so effectually as
to force him to hold his nostrils in a smell of propriety, puffed
into what seems to him a gale from heaven.

The contrast between the recent merpussy in the freshening seas, and
this, as it seemed to him, perfectly gratuitous intrusion of moral
carbolic acid, gave Dr. Conrad a sense of nausea, which his love for
his mother enjoined ignorance of. His mind cast about, not for ways
of excusing Sally--the idea!--but of whitewashing his mother, without