Gentlemen Will Save the World

She is a spinster, as the really grandes dames usually are. And she is known to sit quietly in a straightback mahogany chair--Colonial period-- in a drawing room of shadows, counting her memories on a rosary. She accepts visitors and offers them tea.

For three centuries she has ruled that drawing room and received the generations. Young men coming out of curiosity, out of need, out of cynicism; shuffling and strutting; some of great intelligence and some of little will. And they have left the drawing room essentially the same as they entered it. It was only an interlude. Polite talk and stale crumpets and a few fleet glimpses of her gallery.

Through her parlor window she has watched the world build and the buildings crumble; neon signs, sound trucks, street-cleaners, and bums. She has blessed armies and saved tin cans, and occasionally knitted a sock, in private.

All the while she has been concerned with manners.

Teach them manners. Soap-boxes and sentiment and sympathy haven't saved the world. There are enough den-mothers for all the little boys. Teach them manners. Teach them to be gentlemen.

That's been her diversion every four o'clock for three centuries of Cambridge afternoons. Her young men file in--Apathetic, Beat, Sad, Angry, Intense, or just plain tired--and she teaches them to be gentlemen, for gentlemen will save the world.

Oh, they leave that drawing room looking somewhat alike, pale hands and a shallow scowl and often wearing sensitivity like a club-tie. But there's an occasional sweat shirt and white sneaker; and crusades, revolutions, and reforms have very little to do with clothes.

She endures. And for three centuries she's sent gentlemen into the councils of the world with quiet vigor and small hope.