Life these days expressed itself in a ring of automobiles around the drive of Sard's home. Minga's coming stimulated the activities of a certain set known as the "Bunch," and the various hulking sedans or little roadsters lurching in the gutters were like so many beads on the rosary of her "popularity." In the village the prestige of the maidens was read by these signs. "Peggy Martin can't be very popular. I never see but one car in front of her house." "The Fairs must be very dull people. One never sees any parking on their driveway."

These machines, groomed and glossy, or in some cases dilapidated and frankly dirty, driven by a youth never contented to stay long in one place, had their own individual swan-songs and Iliads, their maladies, their insides, their prowess in speed and climbing, and furnished food for much of the conversation of Minga's associates. A tall, red-headed lad would inquire of his feminine neighbor, lolling in the canvas hammocks on the Judge's terrace of an evening, "Did you see her buck coming over the hill? The old maid! Didn't want to do the stunt on first, so I kicked her into second and she climbed it, the old girl, spitting and blowing. Well, I thought the cranky thing would bust a valve or something."

Then would follow serious dissertation on spark plugs and gas tanks, the new fuels, graded lubricating oils and service fuses.

"Where do you garage now, Dave?" inquired one tan-shirted hedonist.

"Oh, I garage on the front lawn," replied the careless Dave. "Mother hates it, says it spoils the grass, you know, but why bother about grass? Grass isn't fashionable any more—out of date, I tell her, to have grass and flowers and things. Cut all that out, I say, old stuff!"

Another youth, dapper, with the long-boned face of the manipulator of social things, deftly drew attention to his own brand new roadster. "Got Mother to jog the old gentleman some. Went out and played golf with him a couple of times. Result!" With negligent cigarette he indicated the graceful powerful shape. "Like that color? Not too loud, what?" The youth appealed to the girls sitting on the stone coping that swept the river-ward side of the house. "I don't want 'em to think I'm Mary Pickford or anything," was his modest suggestion.

The girls, swinging their feet encased in the flat, practical tennis shoes of the period, looked their usual momentary cold interest. Their heads, impertinently bobbed, or spectacularly "bunned," had abundant hair that covered bright enough little brains, but their mouths, trained into machine talk, dealt machine-like with little well-worn screws and cogs and belts of words, so that what they turned out was machine like; not related thought or challenging conversation, but trite sentences and inferences and ejaculations that made small circles of thought.

Gertrude, the leader of the village girls, smiled dreamily at the car in question. "It's a good make, isn't it?" she said, then—"That firm's worth millions of dollars, they say, even in these after-the-war days." Minga nodded authoritatively, as one who knew. They all looked at her respectfully.

"The Mede says that to drive that car is to drive molten gold," said Minga—it was understood that Minga spoke of her father as the Mede. No one knew exactly what the allusion meant, but it showed somehow that Minga was no slave to parental authority and that she "knew" history.

"I want Dad to get a new car instead of a new piano," said Cynthia. "With the talking machine and George's cornet we don't really need a piano—but I do need a good roadster to—to get to the library and—and church," Cynthia inclined her head demurely.

"Yah—Yah!" they all jeered. "To get to the library and church! Some getting, I'll say!"

Dunstan looked up. "Whew!" he whistled, "to get to the beauty parlor, to the hashish joint, to the ice-cream palace, to the hooch chapel."

"Yah!" they all laughed, Gertrude a little more spitefully than the others. Cynthia Bradon, a lithe, ripe blonde of sixteen, had had experiences with many things. It was known that she had had a few "shots" of morphine and would swallow, for a wager, many hectic and sulphuric beverages. She had run away and been unaccounted for for a week, she had been photographed in a bathing suit by a moving picture man. Cynthia was not sensitive, and her beauty, peach-like and of a glowing dewiness, seemed about the most harmless beauty in the world, because it covered so empty and so trivial a soul. Among the elders, she was considered a lost character. Among those who knew her she was known to be merely silly, lazy and untidy.

Cynthia's own group accepted her without enthusiasm or criticism. She was regarded as one who was no obstructionist and who by sheer triviality added much to the gayety of nations. Her "line" was silliness. Long education by the sensational type of moving picture had removed from these young people any morbid sensitiveness. "Cinny," and "Cinema" as they called her, wanted to find out about morphine—let her. "Fancy," so named from Frances, was a fine swimmer, always diving against her mother's command. She had saved a child once—moral—if Fancy hadn't disobeyed her mother she couldn't have saved the child! Marjorie, who was fat and too evidently made up, was a good sport and awfully nice at picnics and sailed a boat well and was jolly and fair in all games. Gertrude, dubbed facetiously "the road-hog," had nearly killed an old man by running over him in breaking speed laws; but this fact instead of making her in any way taboo, only served to add to her interest as a rather tragic saturnine young person in extremely abbreviated skirts.

They were all far away from the tradition and early training of the parents who had borne them, spent incalculable money on them, scoured the realm for the best food for them; added to their youthful desires, their green sloths, given them leisure and opportunity and crammed them with diversion but neglected to set them an unswerving example of strong, frank, fearless, reverent and purposeful life. The young people of to-day analyzed like a sort of mischievous ivy or burdock burr, growing rank in the pure garden of our purpose, have become what they are merely by feeding on the soil around them. They are the curious sports of a few rather shameful vines and fruits of our own negligence.

When they speak flippantly of love and marriage, they do so with a very accurate knowledge of the percentage of divorces and the reasons for these divorces. When they reveal all that is legally possible of their fine young bodies, they do so after a war which placed the highest percentage on physical superiority and challenged the needs for privacy, and they do so impelled by frankness and a healthy Narcissism that is much better than our old time reticence, our concealment of deformity and weakness, our Æsthetic half-revealing and suggesting that made so strong a desire for full revelation.

It would be rather a joke to find that in these ways youth may surpass us one day in virtue and purity. It is quite possible that Don Juan, about whom we whispered so much behind our hands, would make no impression at all upon the young men and women of Minga's group. Walt Whitman's great biologic, physiologic roaring they would frown over, puzzled. That one man, old, too, with a white beard, should speak familiarly of prostitutes and be so anxious to specify and catalogue arms and legs and thighs and bones and blood and bone-sockets, they would think "queer." But if one were to step out and say to a group like that on the Judge's loggia, "Don Juan was over-sexed. His amours were silly and maudlin because his great creator was an embittered and sensitive and suffering man" there would be a low understanding comment of "Uh, huh?—that so?" and a general cold-blooded note-taking as to Don Juan.

To go on about Whitman and suggest that Walt was a great human comrade who at a time when there were no "legs" and no "spades" spoken of in the world believed in men and women recognizing the glory of sex and helping each other; believed in something divine inside of each that works its way through, no matter how low we sink; believed that we must struggle and overcome, yet be honest while conquering, sincere about life while controlled with it, that would be to receive the casual answer, "Say, that's some little Walt. Where did he tend bar?" But these things would strike little fire. There would be no real interest until one mentioned a new machine, a scientific discovery, a sporting champion or a unique crime. Then keen faces would be bent upon you, keen eyes would interrogate—Facts, facts, facts! So youth pushes by all your dreams, all your virtues, all your sentimentalities and theories for its true meat—facts!

The light, the casual, the cynical, the flippant, the pondering of rather gross realities and in the cases of the girls a very destructive, squalid and ignorant playing with the great laws of life as given into the hands of men and women is the expression of America to-day. To deplore is futile, to try to train any group of children away from these general lines of license and freedom, impossible. It belongs to the age; that age is the aftermath of crazy luxury and wealth. There is some great biologic secret behind it all, and this biologic secret may be that such wealth, such leisure, such exhibition, as opposed to inhibition, as we once deemed desirable is undesirable, unendurable, in that it affects life with a kind of sponginess, a sort of quicksand whereon nothing may grow or be built. It may be that such surroundings as we have tried to give our children have made their bodies fine, but have shrunken and vitiated their souls, that their use of our hard-earned materialism has been to deny all our insistence upon worth and solidity and virtue but it bears one sure portent. To the observer of the "Minga group" all over America to-day it is apparent that this Youth will some day take itself in hand, that it will create a new ethic of worth and virtue that will bear more acute scanning than does ours. That, though they must stop and go back to hard things and solemn things, above all to recreate the things they have wasted; they are preparing for some enormous new Scheme, some great rational universalism; they will perform that duty ultimately, with a greater measure of understanding than our precepts could have given them. They will be free of all tangle and rot of the Seeming, they will know! They will go forward, keen, fearless, open-eyed, fit to help carry on the destiny of the whole world.

Soon the general restlessness on the terrace communicated itself in expression. "Where do we go from here?" asked one chap—he rose and did a short shuffling step, the others clapping their hands and whistling an air which ended with the plaintive refrain: "And the reason he didn't marry me, was his four merry wives across the sea." Minga stepped inside and slipped on the phonograph a record of Honolulu Jazz and to this brassy whistling clangor the couples clinched, and young, long, canvas-shoed, thin legs stepped about in one of the curious walking dances of the time. This over, they stopped and dawdled, staring at each other. There were a few personal sallies, one or two lazy whoops, and then the old thirst for sensation: "Where do we go from here?"

"I know," suggested the youth with the new car—"Dunce, listen to my hunch, love me for my bright ideas. All hike out to Lovejoy's for hot dogs and then back to Billy's for sundaes. Come on, be a sport, everybody, what matter if you've got no coin? I'm cahoots with you, I'll stand the multitude. Got me gold mine with me."

"I can't go," complained Dunstan moodily, "got a quizz coming at eight-thirty, the infernal Latin rooster. I'd like to choke him."

"Cut it out, cut it out!" came a chorus of stern voices.... "Say, Dunce, what's the matter with yah, gettin' queer? Hey? They only put Latin in the cirickulum to please the wives of the trustees. Yah! cut it out, man—say, if yuh don't have any fun, you'll go batty; the doctors all say so. Sure they do! Everybody does go batty that's high-brow and studies and all that drool. Say, cut it out, whoop it up if yuh want to keep from suicide. By heck! you'll do sumpin desperate if you keep up with this Latin, like that feller your old man is going to put in the Can. How about that trial; when is it coming off?"

"Chuck that," muttered Dunstan, a grave significant look in the direction of the house—"Governor is inside. Sard's coming out——"

"Sard's coming out," they chanted gibingly.

"Oh, the Mermaid Lady came out, you bet,
She was not fully dressed:
The pretty curls of her hair were wet
I leave you to guess the rest."

This gem started by the young chap with the new car was taken up and chanted by his associates, all beating time and clapping in imitation of negro minstrels. It was done by way of changing an unwelcome subject and Sard, appearing at the door, put her finger on her lips. "If you want to sing," she said laughingly, "you'll have to go in swimming or something; Father's in his den and I'm sworn to keep things quiet."

"Getting up the data for the great day?" asked one boy saucily.

Sard shook her head at him, but Minga giggled. "Wouldn't it be fun to go right in now, stand in a row in front of Judgie and say, 'We, the under-signed, beg for the freedom of Terence O'Brien, given into our hands,' you know the way they used to do in—in Bret Harte and places," finished Minga a little vaguely. "Get him out from under the law."

The group brightened; here was something to do, something unusual and racy and like the movies; they saw the drama of it.

"You'd have to have a writ of habeas corpus," said one young fellow. He wore large round glasses and looked solemn. "Who's his counsel?" he demanded of Sard, professionally.

She gave the name of a village lawyer—"I'm afraid it's only a form, though poor Dora's wages go for it, for I—I don't believe there is much defense," Sard bent her brows. "It's all wrong, you know; one of us would have the best counsel money could buy; if our own families couldn't afford it, some rich relative would come forward to save the name."

"That's right, she's dead right." The young faces ranged along the terrace wall looked solemnly on Sard; from trifling, aimless pleasure-seekers they became suddenly sober, filled with the sense of human tragedy of inequality and unfairness.

"Well, then, come on." Minga stood on audacious toes; she bowed like a preening butterfly. "Who'll follow? I'll lead!"

Lounging to their feet they made ready to follow her but Sard, older and steadier, restrained them. "That's idiotic," the girl said abruptly—"you don't know what a rage it would put Dad in, Minga! You've never seen him when he's really angry."

"Does he carry on some?" asked one of the boys.

Sard was silent for a moment, then, "He is quite terrible," she said quietly; "it would make things worse in every way to go to Dad now—besides you know as well as I do that he could officially do nothing, but," Sard, looking at them all, spoke low, "I have an idea, I've been thinking."

They always listened respectfully to Sard. She was the stuff of which leaders are made. Indifferent to popularity, caring only for the enterprise in which she was engaged, cool, controlled, just as she was in card games or swimming and tennis, now she took charge of the group as she had done a hundred times before.

"There's that famous lawyer who is spending the summer in the organ builder's house on the mountain; you know about him."

"Don't I," spoke up Minga, eagerly. "He's a great friend of my Cousin Eleanor Ledyard and her little Pudge; he writes Pudge the funniest letters.... My!" sighed Minga. "He's frightfully important; he's been counsel for all the millionaires and magnates, he has eyes like X-rays, they look you through and through. Wow! I'm afraid of him."

The other girl hesitated. "He's famous and all that," she said slowly. "Father knows him well, but I've read things he has written in the magazines and—and—he isn't—well, you know how things are done?" The group, curiously enough, in spite of no reading at all, did know how things are done. How fatally the lies, the subsidizing, the political trickery and chicanery persist in spite of the smug assumptions of virtues; the falsity of the effort to push the world back to an age where just the title of "Christian" would suffice instead of the more recent challenge which insists that the Christian be like Christ. They knew, these little sated, over-indulged, inexperienced sprouts of materialism, somehow or other, they knew.

"The loss of innocence" which their elders so much deplored has given them a cool fatal knowledge of the rottenness hitherto hidden from them; they know the failures and compromises upon which that Æsthetic dream of "innocence" has been dreamed. They will have none of it.

Minga chassÉd to the terrace steps; she pinned a scarf around her head turban-fashion and her eyes shone with adventurous gleam. "Say, listen," she said in the vernacular—"Say—listen—let's all pile in the machines and go up there on the mountain and stand in a row before Watts Shipman. Let's ask him to take Terence's case; let's ask him if he could get Terry off from a life's sentence. All of us—Yes. What? Serve Judgie right," added Minga, indignantly, "for not being willing to talk to me about it."

"Whew!" breathed a young chap in white flannels. The youth, in large horn-rimmed spectacles, went solemnly over to Sard and held out his hand, "I'm with you. It will make a sensation, anyway; maybe we couldn't get much out of Shipman but I'm with you, only what will Papa say?"

Sard had been thinking about that; a curious look in her eyes, she faced the boy. "Father's law is one thing," the girl said it without a trace of disrespect or rebellion, "but mine is another and I want to be true to mine! I don't know how you feel," she looked soberly at the owlish one, "but I can't be happy and know that there is so much tragedy in the world. I can't live under that law."

It was the old sad cry of youth, "Must my happiness, then, be bought at the expense of so much human frustration and misery?" But the owlish-eyed one repudiated this notion.

"You'll have to," he said oracularly—"somebody's always hurting somebody—someone is always getting happiness out of someone's else misery." The horn-rimmed eyes looked very mature and bitter.

But several of the group jumped down from the terrace and were now tinkering with the machines in the drive. Jeering cries came from one to another as the engines started up. "Minga goes with me!" "Aw! go on, you animal, she does not; she goes with me; right here, Minga, where there's a looking-glass and rouge and sachet powder and everything—Sard goes with Thorny Croft. Hey, Nonny, Nonny, the two nuts, the two high-brows! Cinny'll catch cold; she hasn't got enough clothes on; Cinny never has enough clothes on. How about the dance the other night? Well—well—well, we saw a good deal of Cinny!" Not delicate, not pretty, not dignified, not inspiring. But it belongs to the age, Messieur et Mesdames; what part have you had in making the age what it is?