Mrs. Trivett considered some moments before answering. Then she replied: “No, Nicholas Pinhey, you’re not wrong, and I wish I could say you were. You have seen what’s true; but I wouldn’t say the mischief was deep yet. It may be in our power to nip it in the bud.” “You grant it’s true, and that excuses me for touching it. I know my manners I hope, and to anybody else I wouldn’t have come; but you’re different, and if I can prevail upon you to handle Medora, I shall feel I have done all I can do, or have a right to do. In these delicate cases, the thing is to know where the fault lies. And most times it’s with the man, no doubt.” “I don’t know about that. It isn’t this time anyway.” Mr. Pinhey was astonished. “Would you mean to say you see your own daughter unfavourable?” he asked. “You must know the right of a thing if you want to do any good,” declared Lydia. “Half the failure to right wrong so far as I can see, is owing to a muddled view of what the wrong is. I’ve hung back about this till I could see it clear, and I won’t say I do see it clear yet.” “I speak as a bachelor,” repeated Mr. Pinhey, “and therefore with reserve and caution. And if you—the mother of one of the parties—don’t feel you can safely take a hand, it certainly isn’t for anybody else to try.” “As a matter of fact, I was going to do something this very day. My daughter’s coming to tea and I mean to ask her what the matter is. She’s not prone to be exactly straight, is Medora, but seeing I want nothing but her good, I hope she’ll be frank with me.” The man felt mildly surprised to hear a mother criticise her daughter so frankly. “I thought a child could do no wrong in its parents’ eyes,” he said. “Depends on the parent, Mr. Pinhey. If you want to help your child, ’tis no use beginning by taking that line. If we can do wrong, as God knows we can, so can our children, and it’s a vain sort of love to suppose they’re perfect. Medora’s got a great many good qualities, but, like other pretty girls, she’s handicapped here and there. A right down pretty girl don’t know she’s born most times, because everybody in trousers bows down before her and helps to shut reality out of her life.” “It’s the same with money,” surmised Nicholas. “Let a young person have money and they look at the world through tinted glasses. The truth’s hidden from them, and some such go to their graves and never know truth, while others, owing to chance, lose the stuff that stands between them and reality and have a very painful wakening. But as to beauty—you was a woman to the full as fair as your girl—yet look how you weathered the storm.”