ustache, and the smooth
bluish chin, struck her as ideally masculine.

'No parents,' he burst out, 'no parents can see things from their
children's point of view.'

'Oh!' she protested. 'There are times when I feel so like my daughters
that I _am_ them.'

He nodded. 'Yes,' he said, abandoning his position at once, 'I can
believe that. You're an exception. If I hadn't sort of known all the
time that you were, I wouldn't be here now talking like this.'

'It's so accidental, the whole business,' she remarked, branching off to
another aspect of the case in order to mask the confusion caused by the
sincere flattery in his voice. 'It was only by chance that Milly had
that particular part at all. Suppose she hadn't had it. What then?'

'Everything's accidental,' he replied. 'Everything that ever happened is
accidental, in a way--in another it isn't. If you look at your own life,
for instance, you'll find it's been simply a series of coincidences. I'm
sure mine has been. Sheer chance from beginning to end.'

'Yes,' she said thoughtfully, and put her chin in the palm of her left
hand.

'And as for the stage, why, nearly every one goes on the stage by
chance. It just occurs, that's all. And moreover I guarantee that the
parents of fifty per cent. of all the actresses now on the boards began
by thinking what a terrible blow it was to them that _their_ daughters
should want to do _that_. Can't you see what I mean?' He emphasised his
words more and more. 'I'm certain you can.'

She signified assent. It seemed to her, as he continued to talk, that
for the first time she was listening to natural convincing common sense
in that home of hers, where existence was governed by precedent and by
conventional ideas and by the profound parental instinct which meets all
requests with a refusal. It seemed to her that her children, though to
outward semblance they had much freedom, had never listened to anything
but 'No,' 'No, dear,' 'Of course you can't,' 'I think you had better
not,' and 'Once for all, I forbid it.' She wondered why this should have
been so, and why its strangeness had not impressed her before. She had a
distant fleeting vision of a household in which parents and children
behaved like free and sensible human beings, instead of like the
virtuous and the martyrised puppets of a terrible system called 'acting
for the best.' And she thought again what an extraordinary man Arthur
Twemlow was, strong-minded, clear-headed, sy