"The time when it will be a living impossibility for me to stick it out any longer," said Marjorie frankly. "Do you think I can sit here for ever"—with one comprehensive gesture she summarised Netherby, with its stodgy gentility, its squirrel-cage routine, and its cast-iron piety—"twiddling my thumbs? Every girl has a _right_ to make herself efficient, nowadays." "What comes before our rights," said Albert Clegg, "is our duty—our grateful duty to the parents that brought us up." "_Honour thy father and thy mother_," chaunted the apposite Uncle Fred, "_that thy days—_" Marjorie sat up. "I hope I do honour my father and mother," she said. "I am fond of them both: they have been kind to me all my life. But I do not see why I should be particularly grateful to them for bringing me up. After all"—turning to her father—"you _had_ to, hadn’t you? You were responsible for my being here, weren’t you? It seems to me that parents owe a debt to their children—not children to their parents!" This amazingly audacious deliverance—and one had to be familiar with the Clegg tradition to realise how audacious it was—produced a stunning silence. Uncle Fred, fumbling in his repertoire for something really commensurate, breathed alarmingly. Presently Albert Clegg’s heavy voice broke in: "A debt? You mean I owe _you_ a—a debt of gratitude?" "Not gratitude," replied Marjorie. "Something bigger—honour. I think that parents owe it to their children, having brought them into the world—and all that sort of thing," she added a little shyly, "to give them a chance to live the sort of life that appeals to them." Uncle Fred was ready now. "The French," he announced, "are a giddy and godless race!" But neither Albert Clegg nor his daughter took any notice. Wide apart as their natures lay, they had one point in common—inflexible determination. Clegg surveyed Marjorie’s curving lips and hot blue eyes for a moment, and asked: "So you want to live your own life, eh?" Marjorie nodded. "Yes," she said. "At least, I don’t want to rush off and live it right away; but I do think I ought to be given sufficient—" she hesitated for a word. "Equipment?" suggested her father. "Rope?" amended Uncle Fred. Marjorie nodded to her father again. "Yes," she said, "sufficient equipment. A girl ought to be capable of doing something. I have told you some of the things a girl might learn to do, but there are lots of others. Even if she could support herself on the Stage it would be something." "_The Stage?_" Marjorie had exploded a bombshell this time. Uncle Fred’s goat-beard dropped upon his shirt front, and waggled helplessly. Albert Clegg gazed at his daughter long and fixedly. Then he pulled the Bible towards him again, and turned back a page or two in the family record. He twisted the great volume round, and pushed it in his daughter’s direction and pointed. "Look at that," he said.