“Like what?” asked Mr. Mavering, with the unserious interest which Mrs. Primer made most people feel in her talk.

“Oh; it’s too vast a subject.  But they tell you about charming girls moping the whole evening through at Boston parties, with no young men to talk with, and sitting from the beginning to the end of an assembly and not going on the floor once.  They say that unless a girl fairly throws herself at the young men’s heads she isn’t noticed.  It’s this terrible disproportion of the sexes that’s at the root of it, I suppose; it reverses everything.  There aren’t enough young men to go half round, and they know it, and take advantage of it.  I suppose it began in the war.”

He laughed, and, “I should think,” he said, laying hold of a single idea out of several which she had presented, “that there would always be enough young men in Cambridge to go round.”

Mrs. Pasmer gave a little cry.  “In Cambridge!”

“Yes; when I was in college our superiority was entirely numerical.”

“But that’s all passed long ago, from what I hear,” retorted Mrs. Pasmer.  “I know very well that it used to be thought a great advantage for a girl to be brought up in Cambridge, because it gave her independence and ease of manner to have so many young men attentive to her.  But they say the students all go into Boston now, and if the Cambridge girls want to meet them, they have to go there too.  Oh, I assure you that, from what I hear, they’ve changed all that since our time, Mr. Mavering.”

Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she would have approved of in another.  The result was apparent in the jocosity of this heavy Mr. Mavering’s reply.

“Well, then, I’m glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked generation.  But I presume that unnatural supremacy of the young men is brought low, so to speak, after marriage?”

Mrs. Primer let herself go a little further.  “Oh, give us an equal chance,” she laughed, “and we can always take care of ourselves, and something more.  They say,” she added, “that the young married women now have all the attention that girls could wish.”

“H’m!” said Mr. Mavering, frowning.  “I think I should be tempted to box my boy’s ears if I saw him paying another man’s wife attention.”

“What a Roman father!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, greatly amused, and letting herself go a little further yet.  She said to herself that she really must find out who this remarkable Mr. Mavering was, and she cast her eye over the hall for some glimpse of the absent Munt, whose arm she meant to take, and whose ear she meant to fill with questions.  But she did not see him, and something else suggested itself.  “He probably wouldn’t let you see him, or if he did, you wouldn’t know it.”

“How not know it?”

Mrs. Primer did not answer.  “One hears such dreadful things.  What do you say—­or you’ll think I’m a terrible gossip—­”