“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen it myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.

“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,” continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual. That’s the worst symptom yet—that slang is.

“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did—you mushed-up.” His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or else I’m the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”

“Maybe—maybe——” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. “Of course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector—the mere suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible—but on the bare chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her head maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she is that——”

“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating that young people are different from the way young people were when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we were—same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same everything—but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster of ours—not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar, considered 

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