But then we must remember that they are grown-up, that they have an opinion more or less valuable, and that they have idiosyncrasies to be respected, the while they respect ours, remembering our position towards them, our fuller experience, and our affectionate care for them. As long as the parents live, they should be master and mistress in the house; but the children should be as viceroys, helping their parents in every way that they can in their social duties and in the routine of the house. It is trying, we know, to have the piano going and billiard-balls rolling when we want to read Jones’s speech on Home Rule, or Gladstone’s latest statements; but it is far more trying not to know where one’s children are, and to feel they are happier anywhere else than in their own homes. It is their home as much as it is ours, and it will be home indeed if by judicious training in their youth we have made friends of our children, if we have given them our confidence, our affection, and our best days, and have not become strangers to them by being perpetually in society when they were as perpetually sent to school; the while we have not become too familiar, and make them old before their time, by taking them with us to gatherings in smart frocks when they ought to have been disreputably shabby in pinafores in the nursery. Then we shall discover that our grown-up sons and daughters are not so many cuckoos pushing us out of the old nest, but intelligent friends and companions--all the more delightful to us because they are quite grown-up. CHAPTER XIX. ENTERTAINING ONE’S FRIENDS.