ity. It is not pleasant to hear Arabella, returning
from a walk with her father, say to Maude: "Thank Heaven, that's over!
Your turn to-morrow." Perhaps it would not be so if the father did not
by threat or by prayer practically compel his daughters to "take duty."
There are alleviations--games, small social pleasures, dances--but
there is no freedom. A little for the sons, perhaps, but even they are
limited in their comings and goings if they live in their father's
house. As for the girls, they are driven to find the illusion of freedom
in wage labor, unless they marry and develop, as they grow older, the
same problem.

2

Fortunately, and this may save something of the family spirit, times are
changing. It must not be imagined from the foregoing that I am a
resolute enemy of any grouping between men and women, that I view with
hatred the family in a box at the theater or round the Sunday joint. I
am not attracted by the idea of family; a large family collected
together makes me think a little of a rabbit hutch. But I recognize that
couples will to the end want to live together, that they will be fond of
their children, and that their children will be fond of them; also that
it is not socially convenient for husband and wife to live in separate
blocks of flats and to hand over their children to the county council.
There are a great many children to-day who would be happier in the
workhouse than in their homes, but there exists in the human mind a
prejudice against the workhouse, and social psychology must take it into
account. All I ask is that members of a family should not scourge one
another with whips and occasionally with scorpions, and I conceive that
nothing could be more delightful than a group of people, not too far
removed from one another by age, banded together for mutual recreation
and support. So anything that tends to liberalize the family, to
exorcise the ghost of the old patriarch, is agreeable.

Patriarch! What a word--the father as master! He will not be master very
long, and I do not think that he will want to remain master, for his
attitude is changing, not as swiftly as that of his children, but still
changing. He is not so sure of himself now when he doubts the
advisability of pulling down the shed at the back of the garden, and his
youngest daughter quotes from Nietzsche that to build a sanctuary you
must first destroy a sanctuary. And, though he is rather uncomfortable,
he does not say muc