“Do you think it’s good of you, Katherine, considering how much all these years we’ve all been to one another, to persist in marrying a man whom, after really doing our best, we all of us—yes, all of us—dislike? You’re of age, my dear—you can do as you please. It was your father who consented to this engagement, I was not asked. And now, after all these months, it is hardly a success, is it? You are losing us all—and I believe we still mean something to you. And Philip. How can you know about him, my dear? You are in love now, but that—that first illusion goes very quickly after marriage. And then—when it has gone—do you think that he will be a good companion for you, so different from us all, with such strange ideas picked up in foreign countries? You don’t know what he may have done before he met you.... I don’t appeal to your love for us, as once I might have done, but to your common-sense—your common-sense. Is it worth while to lose us, whom you know, in exchange for a man of whom you can know nothing at all?... Just give me those scissors off the dressing-table. The little ones, dear.” Katherine turned at the dressing-table. “But,” she cried, her voice full of passionate entreaty, “_why_ must I give you up because I marry him? Why can’t I have you—all of you—and him as well? _Why_ must I choose?” Then she added defiantly: “Millie doesn’t dislike him—nor Aunt Betty.” “Millie’s very young,” answered her mother. “Thank you, my dear, and _as_ you _are_ there, just that thimble. Thank you ... and your Aunt Betty likes everyone.” “And then,” Katherine went on, “why do you see it from everyone’s point of view except mine? It’s my life, my future. You’re settled—all of you, you, father, Aunt Aggie, Aunt Betty—but with Millie and Henry and I everything’s to come. And yet you expect us to do all the things, think all the things that you’ve done and thought. We’re different, we’re another generation. If we weren’t behind everyone else there wouldn’t be anything to talk about at all. All parents now,” Katherine ended, with an air of profound knowledge, “think of their children. Life isn’t what it was fifty years ago.” Mrs. Trenchard smiled a grim little smile. “These are the things, my dear, I suppose, that Philip’s been telling you. You must remember that he’s been living for years in a country where one can apparently do anything one pleases without being thought wicked, and where you’re put in prison a great deal, but only for rather innocent crimes. I don’t pretend to understand all that. We may be—perhaps we are—an old-fashioned family, but the fact remains that we were all happy enough a year ago.” She picked up the long trailing serpent, then concluded: “But you’re free, Katie dear. Perfectly free.” “If I were to go,” said Katie, staring at her mother’s face, so like that of an uneloquent baby, “if I were to go off now. If we were to be married at once—would you—would you—turn us out—have no more to do with us?”