If we are to continue living together in any sort of happiness and growth the entire basis of our present life will have to be changed. We can do it if we're brave enough to do what people usually do only in books:--face the fact squarely that our family life is and has been a failure, and set about to remedy it. It will mean an entire change of home conditions, and these are the terms of the new arrangement: When I said to you the other day that things would have to go _my_ way now, you were horrified at the conceit of it. To get to facts, there's no conceit in it--because my way is simply the practise of not imposing one's will upon other people. I made the remark merely as a common sense suggestion, and made it out of a seriousness that is desperate. I say "desperate" because I mean that literally: the situation isn't a question of a mere temporary adjustment--just some sort of superficial arrangement so that we can get on pleasantly for a while before the next outbreak comes. The plans Betty and I have discussed have been made in the interest of our whole future lives:--whether we're going to submit (either by surrender or compromise or by just drifting along and not doing anything) to an existence of bickering, nagging, hours spent in the discussion of non-essentials, hideous lack of harmony--the whole stupid programme we've watched working for years and achieving nothing but unhappiness, folly, and a terrible "human waste." You ask us to continue in your way; but from at least three points of view that way has been a failure. I ask you to adopt my way--which has not yet failed. That's why I say it's not conceit, but common sense. My way is simply this: that we three can live together and work in peace and harmony if this awful bugbear of Authority is dropped out of the scheme. Each of us must go her own way; we're all different, and there's no reason why one should impose her authority on the lives of the others. You say that you should because you're our mother. But that's the thing I want to discuss.