Miss Cotton reflected a moment.  “It is strange that such an important question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far from mature.  I never happened to look at it in that light before.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley—­and she made herself comfortable in an arm chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must pass—­“but it’s only part and parcel of the whole affair.  I’m sure that no grown person can see the ridiculous young things—­inexperienced, ignorant, featherbrained—­that nature intrusts with children, their immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies, without rebelling at the whole system.  When you see what most young mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the whole race doesn’t teeth and die.  Yes, there’s one thing I feel pretty sure of—­that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn’t to be mothers at all, there ought to be only grandmothers.”

The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first to become grave.  At the bottom of her heart there was a doubt whether so light a way of treating serious things was not a little wicked.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we shall have to go back to the idea that engagements and marriages are not intended to be regulated by the judgment, but by the affections.”

“I don’t know what’s intended,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “but I know what is.  In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the affections have it their own way, and I must say I don’t think the judgment could make a greater mess of it.  In fact,” she continued, perhaps provoked to the excess by the deprecation she saw in Miss Cotton’s eye, “I consider every broken engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise.”

Miss Cotton said nothing.  The other ladies said, “Why, Mrs. Brinkley!”

“Yes.  The thing has gone altogether too far.  The pendulum has swung in that direction out of all measure.  We are married too much.  And as a natural consequence we are divorced too much.  The whole case is in a nutshell:  if there were no marriages, there would be no divorces, and that great abuse would be corrected, at any rate.”

All the ladies laughed, Miss Cotton more and more sorrowfully.  She liked to have people talk as they do in genteel novels.  Mrs. Brinkley’s bold expressions were a series of violent shocks to her nature, and imparted a terrible vibration to the fabric of her whole little rose-coloured ideal world; if they had not been the expressions of a person whom a great many unquestionable persons accepted, who had such an undoubted standing, she would have thought them very coarse.  As it was, they had a great fascination for her.  “But in a case like that of”—­she looked round and lowered her voice—­“our young friends, I’m sure you couldn’t rejoice if the engagement were broken off.”

“Well, I’m not going to be ‘a mush of concession,’ as Emerson says, Miss Cotton.  And, in the first place, how do you know they’re engaged?”