tennis, or going for a walk. So you can save your sympathy, Mother,” she concluded with a laugh which seemed casual and friendly enough, but which showed plainly the hard inflexibility of her antagonism, “—when I need your condolences I’ll let you know.”
“But, my dear,” said Mrs. Joel with sweet gushing malice—“I think it’s ma-a-rvellous! I only wonder how you do it at your age!… Why, no girl of my time and generation would have thought of doing all the things you do every day without turning a hair—Why!” she breathed, looking around her with an air of fine amazement, “I hear Ida plays five sets before breakfast every morning and thinks nothing of it—but in my day and time, if a girl—a young girl, mind you—played a single set—she’d be positively exhausted—done up for a week.”
“Perhaps, Mother,” Mrs. Pierce coolly suggested, “that is why the young girls of your time were such a soft and grubby lot—and why they turned out to be such dowdy frumps later on.”
Mrs. Joel’s dimpled smile did not lose a single atom of its saccharine benevolence, nor did her voice alter by a shade its honeyed drip, but for a moment something bright and adder-like passed across her eyes, and she gave her step-daughter a swift and poisonous glance that would have done credit to a snake. “—And then, of course,” she went on sweetly, taking the young men at the table into her confidence with her dimpled smile—“we had such old-fashioned notions in those days, too—you boys, I know, would be amused if you could know what some of our quaint notions were—but—hah! hah! hah!”—she laughed a gay and silvery little laugh of envenomed hatred, “—my dear,” she said to Joel, “—you’ll have to laugh when I tell you—but do you know it was actually considered immodest—unwomanly—for a young girl of my time to take part in sports—compete in sports—against men—and as for a woman of Ida’s age doing it—why, it was unthinkable! unheard of!—a middle-aged woman,” she pronounced the words with obvious relish and for a moment there was a swift hard flexion of the muscles in Mrs. Pierce’s jaw—“but a middle-aged woman in my day who had attempted such a thing would have been ostracized—an outcast—decent people would have had nothing to do with her!”
“Yes, I know, Mother,” Mrs. Pierce said with a swift and glacial urbanity. “We’ve all heard about that—I think it’s generally conceded now by most intelligent people that women of that generation were a pretty worthless, dull and barbarous lot.”
