And she will cut in: "But Kitty is not going to the high school. You are absurd. You know perfectly well that. They are sending. Their girls away to shool now."
Such are the interventions of the great goddess They, trampling rough-shod over the inclinations and powers of the private life. And such is the worship of her, instituted daily on a more and more imposing scale as a large class of timid idolaters becomes a potent organized force in the determination of standards.
Under the combined pressure of philosophy, military discipline, and feminine superstition, the younger generation has been driven to conceive of virtue as merely a facile adjustment to the existing environment. It believes to an excessive degree in certain "standardized" ways of making the adjustment. The resulting phenomena have their comic aspects and their grave aspects, which I shall now explore a little according to a method suggested by this profound aphorism of Stevenson's: "Man lives not by bread alone; but mostly by catchwords." All that is most efficacious in the morality of our time is condensed in its catchwords. I shall hunt for the missing soul of the younger generation by following the bits of slang it has dropped in its flight.
