“Oh, come now, Menelaus, that’s rather strong! Didn’t I tell you when you came home that Hermione was full of new ideas, and didn’t you pretend that you liked new ideas yourself? That was Hermione’s last chance for the sheltered life, and it was probably too late then. Your notion of her mind is a generation behind time. I grew up in the rough days, which you can remember too, if you try. You think Hermione belongs to the next period, when the children were found in cabbages. She doesn’t. Her generation are approaching the roughness again from the intellectual and moral point of view, and with a sense of duty. It’s not healthy and I don’t like it. A healthy person would know what sex is for; it’s not a subject for meditation. Do you realise how I came to be discussing such matters with your sheltered daughter? She brought it on herself, speaking of Pyrrhus—she said he was a perfect brute with women, and she proved it by saying that he was living with Andromache. You see, she’d been interested to find that out. She was quite sure that men usually are bad at heart and seduce women. She evidently had given a lot of thought to the problem, and believed all the modern fictions. Wherever she got those ideas, she certainly did not get them from me. I might have told her much more than I did; far from being conscious of any indiscretion, I now admire my restraint. I spoke only about the brutality, as she called it, of men in war—the Ajax-Cassandra sort of thing, which you yourself thought not so bad. I never mentioned the way women behave in times of peace. I never told her that if the normally attractive man accepted all the invitations he gets from ladies, he’d have very little time to himself. I merely said that the only people who could testify as to the brutality of Pyrrhus were the women involved, and that probably, unless human nature is changing, they were devoted to him. That’s about all I said—along with testimony from my own experience.”

“This is very strange,” said Menelaus. “Helen was telling her the same thing one day when I happened to interrupt her. I wonder if my wife has been putting these ideas into the child’s head!”