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said Hester, drawing at her cigarette and watching a ring of smoke float above her head. ‘But I must insist upon my own point of view nevertheless.’

‘A child who has heard no fairy-tales is illiterate,’ said Monica, standing across the room near a table and resting her finger-tips on it as she surveyed the languid form of her daughter-in-law. She kept herself from trembling. ‘Fairy-tales are as much a part of a child’s heritage as Shakespeare and the Gospel of Saint John!’

‘Our modern ideas of a child’s heritage are very different from those of your generation,’ Hester returned. ‘We understand children’s minds in a way you had no opportunity of doing. You were as ignorant of psychology as your grandparents were of evolution.’

‘A great deal of your modern psychology will prove as obsolete in a generation as a great deal of Darwinian evolution has already proved, my dear Hester.’

‘I don’t imagine that anything essential in either will become obsolete,’ said Hester. ‘Jibes at psychoanalysis will be forgotten as completely as jibes at our monkey ancestry.—Of course people try to make fun of what belittles and frightens them.’ And, waiving the general question, she went on.