She does not probably realise how irksome it is to some temperaments to live perpetually in another person’s house, however great their love for that person. A home is controlled by one will alone, it is impossible to make it a republic. If the will is that of Mary’s mother, Mary will often find it tiresome to submit to it: if, by any chance, it comes to be Mary’s will, it is a bad look out for her mother and father. The mere want of privacy in itself is irritating, unless Mary has a den of her own and time of her own which are inviolable. Some parents think that they have an unlimited claim on the time and convenience of their children, forgetting that filial duty, fine and natural a motive as it is, is only one among many motives for human action, and that these motives are in the habit of conflicting. Mary’s mother may be under the apprehension that Mary has complete liberty at home: but Mary knows better. How often is she hindered from sitting down to a solid morning’s work by the knowledge that if she does not do the flowers nobody will. How often when she is just tucking up on a Sunday afternoon for a good read is she not disturbed by the certainty with which the atmosphere is charged that her father will be grieved if he has no companion for his walk? She could, of course, refuse to go, but she would then have to accept all the onus of seeming to be ungracious, and have that absolutely exasperating feeling of having to be apologetic for not doing something of the doing of which there should have been no legitimate expectation, tacit or otherwise. Duty is mostly a repression of one’s own desires, and therefore salutary: but there is a limit to its value, and in some people there is an intense desire to get away from it sometimes, if only for a little. Many a girl who loves her parents and looks with affection on her home, must frequently think with a sigh that even in the squalidest rooms, there would be no flowers to do and nobody to expect one to go on Sunday walks, no feeling that there is somebody to judge one’s friends when they come and to listen to what one says to them, no rigid times for meals, no callers to be entertained when mother is lying down, however absorbed one is in one’s own work, no Emily to play the piano after dinner, in fact no convenience but one’s own to consult at all.