Mrs. Belton thought of her own youth, so sheltered, among girls of her own sort who might look funny now with their heavy knobs or puffs of hair, their long skirts, their unadorned lips and finger-nails, their mothers’ eye always more or less over them, but were all what she roughly called one’s own sort. And then she thought of her Elsa, brought up in what had almost amounted of late to genteel poverty, and now absorbed in whatever her secret work was, among a lot of young women who must undeniably have brains or they wouldn’t be there, but many of whom her daughter, in normal times, would never have come across. All this mixing might be a good thing, but she felt too old for it and frankly hated it.
“It’s a queer mixed lot everywhere now,” said Mr. Belton. “There are men on the Bench th
