Then there was tea and a bath and bed, though not to sleep for a long time, for Laura had a bed in her two middle cousins’ room and they talked a great deal. Talking in bed was a novelty to her, for it would not have been permitted at home. In her cousins’ home there was more liberty. That night, once or twice one of their parents called upstairs telling them to be quiet and let poor little Laura get to sleep; but the talking went on, a little more quietly, until long after they heard the front door bolt shot and the window sashes in the lower rooms pushed up. What do little girls talk about when they are alone together? If we could remember that, we should understand the younger generation better than we do. All Laura could remember was that that particular conversation began with a cousin saying, “Now, Laura, we want to know all about you,” and that in the course of it one of them asked her: “Do you like boys?”

When she said, “I like Edmund,” they laughed and she was told: “I mean boys, not brothers.”

Laura thought at first they meant sweethearts and grew very hot and shy; but, no, she soon found they just simply meant boys to play with. She found afterwards that the boys they knew talked to them freely and let them join in their games, which surprised her, for the boys at home despised girls and were ashamed to be seen talking to one. The hamlet mothers encouraged this feeling. They taught their boys to look down upon girls as inferior beings; while a girl who showed any disposition to make friends of, or play games with, the boys was “a tomboy” at best, or at worst “a fast, forward young hussy”. Now she had come to a world where boys and girls mixed freely. Their mothers even gave parties to which both were invited; and the boys were told to give up things to the girls, not the girls to the boys—“Ladies first, Willie!” How queer it sounded!