Dangerous Ages

led down from the garden, and Esau yapped in answer. They were cal

from the beech. Kay and Gerda were of enormous importance; the most important things in life,

golden with morning, they flung themselves upon her and

st," they chanted. "Late on

unabashed of things which Neville felt revolting. And she, herself, was the product of a fastidious generation and class, and as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which however is not, and can never be, saying much. Kay would do the same. They would read and discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each other, and fathers and sons-but they both all the same took seriously things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and Kay didn't, in point of fact, find so many things either funny or disgusting as Neville did; throwing her mind back twenty years, Neville tried to remember whether she had found the world as funny and as frightful when she was a medical student as she did now; on the whole she thought not. Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of infinite solemnities and pomposities. They laugh; but the twinkling irony, mocking at itself and ever