No let them read the story-books we write for them, they don't learn much, to be sure, but more than they can from their fathers', mothers', aunts' and uncles' talking. Yes from their fathers' and their mothers' living they can get some wisdom, yes supply them with a tradition by your lives, you grown men and women, and for the rest let them come to us for their teaching.
     But now to come back to Julia Dehning. As I was saying, to a girl like Julia Dehning, all men, excepting those of an outside unknown world, those one reads about in books and never really can believe in, or men like Jameson to whom one never could belong and whom one always knows, now after having once begun with one's living, for what they are whenever one met with them, I say for a girl like Julia Dehning, with the family with which she had all her life been living, to her all men that could be counted as men by her and could be thought of as belonging ever to her, they must be, all, good strong gentle creatures, honest and honorable and honoring. For her to doubt this of all men, of decent men, of men whom she could ever know well or belong to, to doubt this would be for her to recreate the world and make one all from her own head. Surely, of course, she knew it, there were the men one could read of in the books and hear of in the scandal of the daily news, but never could such things be true of men of her own world. For her to think it in herself as real any such a thing would be for her to imagine a vain thing, to recreate the world and make a new one all out of her own head.
     No, this was a thought that could not come to her to really think, and so for her the warnings of her father carried no real truth. Of course Alfred Hersland was a good and honest man. All decent men, all men who belonged to her own kind and to whom she could by any chance belong, were good and straight. They had this as they had all simple rights in a sane and simple world. Hersland had besides that he was brilliant, that he knew that there were things of beauty in the world, and that he was in his bearing and appearance a distinguished man. And then over and above all this, he was so freely passionate in his fervent love.
     And so the marriage was really to be made. Mrs. Dehning now all reconciled and eager, began the trousseau and the preparation of the house that the young couple were to have as a wedding portion from the elder Dehnings.
     In dresses, hats and shoes and gloves and underwear, and jewel ornaments, Julia was very ready to follow her mother in her choice and to agree with her in all variety and richness of trimming in material, but in the furnishing of her own house it must be as she wished, taught as she now had been that there were things of beauty in the world and that decoration should be strange and like old fashions, not be in the new. To have the older things themselves had not yet come to her to know, nor just how old was the best time that they should be. It was queer in its results this mingling of old taste and new desire.
     The mother was all disgusted, half-impressed; she sneered at these new notions to her daughter and bragged of it to all of her acquaintance. She followed Julia about now from store to store, struggling to put in a little her own way, but always she was beaten back and overborne by the eagerness of knowing and the hardness of unconsidering disregard with which her daughter met her words.
     The wedding day drew quickly near with all this sharp endeavor of making her new home just what it should be for the life which was to come. Julia thought more of her ideals these days than of her man. Hersland had always, a little, meant more to her as an ideal than as a creature to be known and loved. She had made him, to herself, as she was now making her new house, an unharmonious unreality, a bringing complicated natural tastes to the simplicities of fitness and of decoration of a self-digested older world.
     I say again, this was all twenty years ago before the passion for the simple line and toned green burlap on the wall and wooden panelling all classic and severe. But the moral force was making then, as now, in art, all for the simple line, though then it had not come to be, as now alas it is, that natural sense for gilding and all kinds of paint and complicated decoration in design all must be suppressed and thrust away, and so take from us the last small hope that something real might spring from crudity and luxury in ornament. In those days there was still some freedom left to love elaboration in good workmanship and ornate rococoness and complication in design. And all the houses of one's friends and new school rooms and settlements in slums and dining halls and city clubs, had not yet taken on this modern sad resemblance to a college woman's college room.
     Julia Dehning's new house was in arrangement a small edition of her mother's.