Men feel this longing for privacy and independence, why should it seem strange and regrettable in girls? As a whole, they are less capable of looking after themselves than their brothers, perhaps, but that is partly due to their weaker social position. Also Mary’s case is by no means that of every girl, a fact which unfairly tells against Mary, who does not care a snap of her fingers for Emily’s docility and want of enterprise. Individuals have got to work out their own salvation, a task which is always made far more difficult for Mary than for her brother. Of course, there are infinite degrees of stress and accommodation in this relation of Mary and her mother: circumstances, character, common sense, temper, nerves, compatibility, all play their parts in different admixtures. Where Mary and her mother are both sensible, or arrive at sense by suffering, the final accommodation is generally satisfactory. Where sense is wanting, or passion clouds it, there will always be trouble: and, however much Mary’s mother may have to put up with from Mary, of which Mary may be only vaguely conscious, yet she is in the main to blame for not agreeing to one obvious solution of letting Mary do what she wants. She may be as certain as the snow is white that Mary is really happier under her roof, and that only her own tactful care prevents Mary from making some disastrous mistakes through her own inexperience or defects of character; she may even be more right than wrong in this belief: yet the fact remains that Mary is grown up and is the only person who can, in the long run, be responsible for her life. Is it right to thwart without convincing her, when it is possible to let her obtain conviction by experience? Only on the most antiquated theory of parental authority and filial subordination, a theory which rests upon no observed facts but rather upon a persistent blindness to the truth.