And then there were the daughters. I wasn’t much at ease with girls at that time of my life, neither the ones I met at university, nor the Carolines at the tennis club. I didn’t understand that they were mostly just as nervous as I was about … the whole caboodle. And while boys were good at coming up with their own, home-made bullshit, girls, in their understanding of the world, often seemed to fall back on The Wisdom of Their Mothers.
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 653–6