CONRAD.  Behave yourself.  Theres a visitor.

She turns quickly and sees the rector.  She instinctively switches at her Gozzoli fringe with her fingers, but gives it up as hopeless.

FRANKLYN.  Mr Haslam, our new rector. [To Haslam] My daughter Cynthia.

CONRAD.  Usually called Savvy, short for Savage.

SAVVY.  I usually call Mr Haslam Bill, short for William. [She strolls to the hearthrug, and surveys them calmly from that commanding position].

FRANKLYN.  You know him?

SAVVY.  Rather.  Sit down, Bill.

FRANKLYN.  Mr Haslam is going, Savvy.  He has an engagement.

SAVVY.  I know.  I’m the engagement.

CONRAD.  In that case, would you mind taking him into the garden while I talk to your father?

SAVVY [to Haslam] Tennis?

HASLAM.  Rather!

SAVVY.  Come on. [She dances out.  He runs boyishly after her].

FRANKLYN [leaving his table and beginning to walk up and down the room discontentedly] Savvy’s manners jar on me.  They would have horrified her grandmother.

CONRAD [obstinately] They are happier manners than Mother’s manners.

FRANKLYN.  Yes:  they are franker, wholesomer, better in a hundred ways.  And yet I squirm at them.  I cannot get it out of my head that Mother was a well-mannered woman, and that Savvy has no manners at all.

CONRAD.  There wasnt any pleasure in Mother’s fine manners.  That makes a biological difference.

FRANKLYN.  But there was beauty in Mother’s manners, grace in them, style in them:  above all, decision in them.  Savvy is such a cub.

CONRAD.  So she ought to be, at her age.

FRANKLYN.  There it comes again!  Her age! her age!

CONRAD.  You want her to be fully grown at eighteen.  You want to force her into a stuck-up, artificial, premature self-possession before she has any self to possess.  You just let her alone:  she is right enough for her years.

FRANKLYN.  I have let her alone; and look at the result!  Like all the other young people who have been let alone, she becomes a Socialist.  That is, she becomes hopelessly demoralized.

CONRAD.  Well, arnt you a Socialist?

FRANKLYN.  Yes; but that is not the same thing.  You and I were brought up in the old bourgeois morality.  We were taught bourgeois manners and bourgeois points of honor.  Bourgeois manners may be snobbish manners:  there may be no pleasure in them, as you say; but they are better than no manners.  Many bourgeois points of honor may be false; but at least they exist.  The women know what to expect and what is expected of them.  Savvy doesn’t.  She is a Bolshevist and nothing else.  She has to improvise her manners and her conduct as she goes along.  It’s often charming, no doubt; but sometimes she puts her foot in it frightfully; and then I feel that she is blaming me for not teaching her better.