It might be a play; it's certainly rather good for reality. And what happened? The mother refused to "accept the terms"--which is not surprising, perhaps; and the household broke up into two establishments with results that will disappoint the conservative who thinks those girls should have been soundly beaten. The first wrench of it, the girl said, reminded her of George's parting with Marion in _Tono-Bungay_:--that sense of belonging to each other immensely, that "profound persuasion of irreparable error" in the midst of what seemed profoundly right. "Nothing is simple," Wells wrote in that connection; "every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil." But the girl and her mother have learned to be friends as a result of that break, and the latter will tell you now that it was the right thing to have done. The preface to _Misalliance_ has such a wealth of quotable things in it that the only way to get them appreciated is to quote. Shaw has said much of this before, but it is all so valuable that it ought to be shouted from the housetops: The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go. What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do. Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach.... Francis records the habit with bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Free-thinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.