"You pry too deep to be an altogether very respectful person," she said; "but since you have pryed, I must make the best of it and confess. I knew your father would not understand my ideas, so I too humbugged a little—just a very little. I wanted you to go to London, and afterwards into the world. It was the only way." "And now this is the end of it all!" Nora Ingestre rose and stood by her mother’s side. Her voice rang with all the protest and despair of which youth is so capable—very real protest and very real despair, whole-hearted and intense, as is the way with youth. "It wasn’t the music," she went on. "I loved it, of course, but I wanted to see the world and people more than anything else. I wanted the world so badly, mother. I felt like a caged animal that sees the forests and the plains through its prison bars. I wanted to get out and be free. Oh, you can’t understand—you can’t!" Mrs. Ingestre stirred suddenly, as though a wound had been touched with rough fingers. "I do understand," she said. But Nora was too young, above all, too absorbed in her own griefs, to hear all that was hidden in her mother’s words. "At any rate, no one else would understand," she went on. "Father wouldn’t, Miles wouldn’t, and the whole village wouldn’t. They would all say I was a New Woman, or unwomanly, or something—why, I don’t know. I don’t care whether I have a vote or not. I can cook and I can sew; I love children. All that sort of thing is womanly, isn’t it? Isn’t it womanly to want to live, and to know what life means? Nobody thinks it strange that Miles, though he has no talent for anything except loafing, should travel, should live away from home and get to know other people. It is all for his development! But I am not to develop, it seems. Perhaps development isn’t womanly. Perhaps the only right thing for me to do is to look after the flowers and worry the cook and bore myself through my days with tea-parties and tennis-parties and occasional match-making dances, until somebody asks me to be his wife, and I marry him to save myself from turning into a vegetable!" She stopped, breathless with her fierce torrent of sarcasm and bitterness. Her cheeks were flushed, her hands clenched; there were tears in her bright eyes. Mrs. Ingestre rose and followed her daughter to the window, whither she had wandered in her restless energy. "How long have you been thinking all this, Nora?" she asked. "Ever since I left school and Miles went to Sandhurst. Until then it all seemed fair enough. He had been to school and I had been to school. But after that, just when I was beginning to learn because I loved it, just when I was beginning to see things and understand them—then I was brought home—here—and there was an end to it." Mrs. Ingestre put her arm about her daughter’s shoulders. "And then you remembered that you were musical?" she said. "And you discovered that I was a genius!" came the retort. Mrs. Ingestre laughed quietly.