The family had always understood that it was natural for Millicent to find them slow—no pains had been spared over Millicent’s development. She had just finished her education in Paris and was coming back to London. Always future plans now were discussed with a view to finding amusement for Millicent. “Millie will be here then”. “I wonder whether Millie will like him.” “You’d better accept it. Millie will like to go.” Beyond all the family Katherine loved Millicent. It had begun when Millie had been very small and Katherine had mothered her,—it had continued when Millie, growing older, had plunged into scrapes and demanded succour out of them again—it had continued when Katherine and Millie had developed under a cloud of governesses, Millie brilliant and idle, Katherine plodding and unenterprising, it had continued when Millie, two years ago, had gone to Paris, had written amusing, affectionate letters, had told “Darling Katie that there was _no one_, no one, no ONE, anywhere in all the world, to touch her—Mme. Roget was a pig, Mlle. Lefresne, who taught music, an angel, etc. etc.” Now Millicent was coming home.... Katherine was aware that from none of the family did she receive more genuine affection than from Henry, and yet, strangely, she was often irritated with Henry. She wished that he were more tidy, less rude to strangers, less impulsive, more of a comfort and less of an anxiety to his father and mother. She was severe sometimes to Henry and then was sorry afterwards. She could ‘do anything with him,’ and wished therefore that he had more backbone. Of them all she understood her mother the best. She was very like her mother in many ways; she understood that inability to put things into words, that mild conviction that ‘everything was all right’, a conviction to be obtained only by shutting your eyes very tight. She understood, too, as no other member of the family understood, that Mrs. Trenchard’s devotion to her children was a passion as fierce, as unresting, as profound, and, possibly, as devastating as any religion, any superstition, any obsession. It _was_ an obsession. It had in it all the glories, the dangers, the relentless ruthlessness of an overwhelming ‘idée fixe’—that ‘idée fixe’ which is at every human being’s heart, and that, often undiscovered, unsuspected, transforms the world.... Katherine knew this. For her father she had the comradeship of a play-fellow. She could not take her father very seriously—he did not wish that she should. She loved him always and he loved her in his ‘off’ moments, when he was not thinking of himself and his early Nineteenth Century—if he had any time that he could spare from himself it was given to her. She thought it quite natural that his spare time should be slender.