She left her sewing and sat down, the letter open on her knees. One definite thought held her now--this must be stopped--at any cost! But where was she to find the money? She crossed to the table by the window, unlocked a drawer and drew out her pass-book, turning the pages feverishly. There was Roddy, clamouring for clothes, household bills in abeyance, Jill's music lessons to pay ... Then, like a flash, it came to her. Her diamond star! Yes--that must go. Anything--to keep Stephen! She felt like a man who for many months has moved on crutches and finds himself suddenly bereft of them, helpless, without support ... But was it fair?--fair to Jill. The star had been her husband's gift--she had meant to leave it to her child. The fight began. In reality, it resolved itself into a choice between the pair--Stephen, her friend, and Jill ... that "independent" daughter. The adjective betrayed her mood. For, proud as she was in her mother's heart of the bright young girl with her clever brain, the rankling fact was hidden there--her offspring had outgrown the nest. She could not realize that the age was mainly responsible for the lack of what she called "proper respect"--that mid-Victorian subservience. She held that what _she_ considered fit was the natural guidance for the girl; that the latter should shape her every thought in the mould of the past generation. Yet she, herself, had broken loose. It did not occur to her to weigh the question of militant suffrage in the same scales her own mother had used... Marriage had given her the right to an independent judgment, she thought--the full authority of the woman. She did not see that life had changed. That the youth of to-day asserted their claim to a freedom of thought unknown in her time, upheld by a sounder education. She hated in secret the very word. It had been sufficient in her day for a girl to possess a smattering of surface knowledge from old-fashioned primers. A little French, history, grammar, needlework and "good manners": of music enough to produce "pieces" when required for home consumption. But no training for the brain--little logic or reasoning power--the arts neglected for fear they should bring an alarming hint of Bohemianism. And "what mother says is right." This was an axiom, weighty, approved; stifling all further argument, the Alpha and Omega of the question. Jill's intensely modern attitude, fostered by her college life, her alarming tendency to revoke old standards of convention--even her religious doubts, honestly faced, shocked her mother and threatened her authority. She mourned in secret over her child. Stephen, now--her face relaxed--was always attentive, glad to learn ... With a charming courtesy he bent to her will, respecting her every opinion. With her delicate purity of intention it never occurred to her to see that the fact of sex was involved here, Nature at work in her hidden ways.