is so, often; but not, I think, where the parents have truly
understood their problem. The real difficulty for father and mother is
not childhood, but youth; how to get over that difficult time when
the child passes into the man or woman, and a relation of governor and
governed should become the purest and closest of friendships. You and I
have been lucky.'

'Yes,' she said, looking straight before her, and still speaking with
a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, 'and so are the greater
debtors! There is no excuse, I think, for any child, least of all for
the child who has had years of understanding love to look back upon, if
it puts its own claim first; if it insists on satisfying itself, when
there is age and weakness appealing to it on the other side, when it is
still urgently needed to help those older, to shield those younger,
than itself. Its business first of all is to pay its debt, whatever the
cost.'

The voice was low, but it had the clear, vibrating ring of steel.
Robert's face had darkened visibly.

'But, surely,' he cried, goaded by a now stinging sense of revolt and
pain-'surely the child may make a fatal mistake if it imagines that its
own happiness counts for nothing in the parents' eyes. What parent but
must suffer from the starving of the child's nature? What have mother
and father been working for, after all, but the perfecting of the
child's life? Their longing is that it should fulfil itself in all
directions. New ties, new affections, on the child's part mean the
enriching of the parent. What a cruel fate for the elder generation, to
make it the jailer and burden of the younger!'

He spoke with heat and anger, with a sense of dashing himself against an
obstacle, and a dumb despairing certainty, rising at the heart of him.

'Ah, that is what we are so ready to say,' she answered, her breath
coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism
in it; 'but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out
the plain duty. The parent wants the child's help and care, the child is
bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties,
it belongs to them, not to the old ones; the old ones must come to be
forgotten and put aside.'

'So you would make all life a sacrifice to the past?' he cried,
quivering under the blow she was dealing him.

'No, not all life,' she said, struggling hard to preserve her perfect
calm of manner: he could not know that