Geary began to smile.

“Well, now, I don’t care,” retorted young Haight, “I like that sort of thing.”

“So do I,” said Vandover.  “Up home, now, the governor asks a blessing at each meal, and somehow I wouldn’t like to see him leave it off.  But you can’t tell me,” he went on, going back to the original subject of their discussion, “you can’t tell me that American society girls, city-bred, and living at the end of the nineteenth century, don’t know about things.  Why, man alive, how can they help but know?  Look at those that have brothers—­don’t you suppose they know, and if they know, why don’t they use their influence to stop it?  I tell you if any one were to write up the lives that we young men of the city lead after dark, people wouldn’t believe it.  At that party that Henrietta Vance gave last month there were about twenty fellows there and I knew every one, and I was looking around the supper-table and wondering how many of those young fellows had never been inside of a disreputable house, and there was only one beside Dolly Haight!”

Young Haight exclaimed at this, laughing good-naturedly, twirling his thumbs, and casting down his eyes with mock-modesty.

“Well, that’s the truth just the same,” Vandover went on.  “We young men of the cities are a fine lot.  I’m not doing the baby act.  I’m not laying the blame on the girls altogether, but I say that in a measure the girls are responsible.  They want a man to be a man, to be up to date, to be a man of the world and to go in for that sort of vice, but they don’t know, they don’t dream, how rotten and disgusting it is.  Oh, I’m not preaching.  I know I’m just as bad as the rest, and I’m going to have a good time while I can, but sometimes when you stop and think, and as Dolly says ‘call things by their right names,’ why you feel, don’t you know—­queer.”

“I don’t believe, Van,” responded young Haight, “that it’s quite as bad as you say.  But it’s even wrong, I think, that a good girl should know anything about vice at all.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense,” broke in Geary; “you can’t expect nowadays that a girl, an American girl, can live twenty years in a city and not know things.  Do you think the average modern girl is going to be the absolutely pure and innocent girl of, say, fifty years ago?  Not much; they are right on to things to-day.  You can’t tell them much.  And it’s all right, too; they know how to look out for themselves, then.  It’s part of their education; and I think if they haven’t the knowledge of evil, and don’t know what sort of life the average young man leads, that their mothers ought to tell them.”

“Well, I don’t agree with you,” retorted young Haight.  “There’s something revolting in the idea that it’s necessary a young girl should be instructed in that sort of nastiness.”

“Why, not at all,” answered Geary.  “Without it she might be ruined by the first man that came along.  It’s a protection to her virtue.”