"Well, they don't." Edith half loungingly swung herself in a Gloucester hammock. "What we've got to learn, mother dear, is that entertaining, as we called it, was a pre-war habit which we've outlived in spirit, though we haven't quite come to the point in fact."
"There's something in that," Collingham agreed.
"And yet there's got to be hospitality," Junia reasoned. "You can't just live and die to yourself."
"Hospitality, yes; but isn't there a difference between that and entertaining?"
"I'm not sure that I can say. Isn't the one a permanent necessity, and the other merely a custom that can go out of date?"
"Between your custom that can go out of date and your permanent necessity, I don't see that there's much distinction."
"Well, there is, mother dear. It's like this: Entertaining is giving people something they don't particularly want and which you expect them to repay; while hospitality is opening your house to people in need, whether they can repay you or not."
"Oh, if we're going to open our houses to people in need--"
"I'm sure I don't know what; nor you, either."
"And that's just it. We're halting between two states of mind. Ever since the war began, mere entertaining bores us; and we're terrified at the idea of genuine hospitality; so there we are. We still give dinners and go to them; but when we do we feel it's something fatuous, which can't help making us dull."
Out of the silence that ensued Collingham said, moodily:
"It's all very fine to talk of opening your house to people in need; but it's not as easy as it looks."
"Is anything ever as easy as it looks, dad? Don't we shirk the social problems that are upsetting the world by declaring them impossible to solve, when a material difficulty only puts us on our mettle?"
He turned this over. All that day he had been calculating his own possible responsibility in Teddy Follett's going wrong, and was thinking of it now. In the end he said:
"All the same you've got to follow the regular trend. If you were in business you'd know. You can't do things differently from other people. You may be as sorry as you like not to be able to help; but if you can't, you can't--and there's an end of it."
"Mr. Ayling in his new book, _Social Problems and the Individual_, says there's a distinction to be drawn between _can't_ and _can't_--there's the can't that comes from lack of ability, and the can't that springs from the accepted standard. He says--"