When I Was One-and-Twenty

“When you are young, they assume you know nothing”

Heard behind cardigan's argument with youthful knowing: in Housman's A Shropshire Lad lyric, a wise man tells the speaker at one-and-twenty to give crowns and pounds and guineas but not his heart away, and by two-and-twenty the speaker concedes 'tis true, 'tis true. Where Housman lets age have the last word, cardigan runs the lesson in reverse: the speaker insists she knew everything when she was young, the dismissed certainty of youth vindicated rather than corrected.