"I hope you won’t get upset about me again, mother," she said, unemotionally. "I’m quite old enough to take care of myself—" "You’d better go to your room, Janet!" exclaimed Emily, "before you kill mother with your cruel selfishness." "I’m not aware that I’m under orders to you, Emily, or that you’ve the right to play the Pharisee because you’re content to lead a stagnant, hole-in-the-corner life. If you wanted anything you’d disobey mother fast enough. Only you happen to _have_ no wants. And you make a virtue of your necessity. I have plenty of wants. And you persuade mother that my necessity is a vice." "Be as theatrical as possible, Janet!" said Emily. "Why don’t you add that I poisoned mother’s mind against you?" "You didn’t have to carry coals to Newcastle, Emily. You merely had to fan the flame in your own sweet, sisterly way." Mrs. Barr checked them both with an autocratic wave of her hand. "You need not abuse Emily, or me either," she decreed, black-browed. "There is absolutely nothing more to be said. Either you respect my wishes about your comings and goings, or you leave my house." "Mother, do you really propose to put me out for refusing to submit to an arbitrary wish?" "I should think I had fallen far short of my duty, if I did not guard my children against sensual folly—" "By showing them the door?" "If you leave your home, it will be by your own choice and not by your mother’s command," said Mrs. Barr, emphatically. "This is your home. It will remain yours so long as you keep Christian precepts. But a mother must hold the family hearth inviolate against evil doing. I cannot condone a wicked waste of the Lord’s time simply because you describe the practice as a wish to be free. If you don’t value a good home, you are certainly quite free to choose another." "Why must I adopt the habits that suit your tastes and Emily’s, but that are hateful to mine?" "My child, you are flesh of my flesh—" "All the laws and all the prophets can’t justify the narrow, friendless, joyless, medieval life that you wish me to lead," cried Janet, in a passion of insurgency. "When you were young you led no such life yourself. Aunt Mary, your own sister, told me that you were the flightiest girl in the family. Your girlhood was a perpetual round of balls, theatres, parties and flirtations. Do I ask for a life of pleasure like that? No. I simply want to choose my own friends, trust to my own instincts, and follow my own bent."