h other.'

'Isn't it wonderful to you?' said Catherine, after a little electric
pause--and her voice was steadier and clearer than it had been since the
beginning of their conversation--'how little the majority of sons and
daughters regard their parents when they come to grow up and want to
live their own lives? The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to
throw off their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them--decently, of
course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All the long
years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.'

He looked at her quickly--a troubled, questioning look.

'It 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 new 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,'