“Possibly--bit by bit.... But it was hopelessly hard to put. I said I knew he disliked and distrusted you and your work--that you shared all Russell’s opinions: he hates Russell beyond measure--and that we couldn’t possibly face a conventional marriage. What else could one say? I left him to suppose--a registry perhaps....” Capes let his oar smack on the water. “Do you mind very much?” He shook his head. “But it makes me feel inhuman,” he added. “And me....” “It’s the perpetual trouble,” he said, “of parent and child. They can’t help seeing things in the way they do. Nor can we. WE don’t think they’re right, but they don’t think we are. A deadlock. In a very definite sense we are in the wrong--hopelessly in the wrong. But--It’s just this: who was to be hurt?” “I wish no one had to be hurt,” said Ann Veronica. “When one is happy--I don’t like to think of them. Last time I left home I felt as hard as nails. But this is all different. It is different.” “There’s a sort of instinct of rebellion,” said Capes. “It isn’t anything to do with our times particularly. People think it is, but they are wrong. It’s to do with adolescence. Long before religion and Society heard of Doubt, girls were all for midnight coaches and Gretna Green. It’s a sort of home-leaving instinct.” He followed up a line of thought. “There’s another instinct, too,” he went on, “in a state of suppression, unless I’m very much mistaken; a child-expelling instinct.... I wonder.... There’s no family uniting instinct, anyhow; it’s habit and sentiment and material convenience hold families together after adolescence. There’s always friction, conflict, unwilling concessions. Always! I don’t believe there is any strong natural affection at all between parents and growing-up children. There wasn’t, I know, between myself and my father. I didn’t allow myself to see things as they were in those days; now I do. I bored him. I hated him. I suppose that shocks one’s ideas.... It’s true.... There are sentimental and traditional deferences and reverences, I know, between father and son; but that’s just exactly what prevents the development of an easy friendship. Father-worshipping sons are abnormal--and they’re no good. No good at all. One’s got to be a better man than one’s father, or what is the good of successive generations? Life is rebellion, or nothing.”