all her poor
mother would have wanted. When we go up to town you must take her to
concerts--the opera--that kind of thing. I dare say it will go all
right!" But the tone was one of resignation, rather than certainty.

"I'll do my best--" began Mrs. Friend.

"I'm sure you will. But--well, we'd better be frank with each other.
Helena's very handsome--very self-willed--and a good bit of an heiress.
The difficulty will be--quite candidly--_lovers_!"

They both laughed. Lord Buntingford took out his cigarette case.

"You don't mind if I smoke?"

"Not at all."

"Won't you have one yourself?" He held out the case. Mrs. Friend did not
smoke. But she inwardly compared the gesture and the man with the
forbidding figure of the old woman in Lancaster Gate with whom she had
just completed two years of solitary imprisonment, and some much-baffled
vitality in her began to revive.

Lord Buntingford threw himself back in his arm-chair, and watched the
curls of smoke for a short space--apparently in meditation.

"Of course it's no good trying the old kind of thing--strict chaperonage
and that sort of business," he said at last. "The modern girl won't
stand it."

"No, indeed she won't!" said Mrs. Friend fervently. "I should like to
tell you--I've just come from ----" She named a university. "I went to
see a cousin of mine, who's in one of the colleges there. She's going to
teach. She went up just before the war. Then she left to do some war
work, and now she's back again. She says nobody knows what to do with the
girls. All the old rules have just--_gone_!" The gesture of the small
hand was expressive. "Authority--means nothing. The girls are entering
for the sports--just like the men. They want to run the colleges--as they
please--and make all the rules themselves."

"Oh, I know--" broke in her companion. "They'll just allow the wretched
teachers and professors to teach--what their majesties choose to learn.
Otherwise--they run the show."

"Of course, they're awfully _nice_ girls--most of them," said Mrs.
Friend, with a little, puzzled wrinkling of the brow.

"Ripping! Done splendid war work and all that. But the older generation,
now that things have begun again, are jolly well up a tree--how to fit
the new to the old. I have some elderly relations at Oxbridge--a nice old
professor and his wife. Not stick-in-the-muds at all. But they tell me
the world there--where the young women are concerned--seems to be
standing on it