Those children, as they passed through early childhood, never saw their parents but happy and good-spirited. They never saw them worried nor ever saw them sad. That was, as one might say, Rosalie’s chief offering to her darlings. It was splendid to Rosalie that her way of life, far from causing her (as prejudice would have prophesied) to neglect her children, enabled her to consider them in their relations with herself as, by their mothers, children in her childhood never were considered. That they should associate nothing--nothing at all--but happiness with her was the basis of it. Children, she held, ought not to see their parents bad-tempered or distressed or in any way out of sorts or out of control. For a child to do so has in two ways a bad effect on the child mind. In the first place, it is harmful for children to come in contact with the unpleasant things of life; in the second, parents should always be to their children models of conduct and of disposition. They should in themselves present ideals to their children. A man should be a hero to his son; a woman an ideal to her daughter. Why is no man a hero to his valet? It is simply because his valet sees him, as do not those whose esteem he desires to win, in his off moments. Children should never see their parents in their off moments. This principle was not Rosalie’s alone. It is the modern principle. The point, to Rosalie, was that, by her way of life, she was able to apply it. Children were too much with their parents. That was the fault; in her childhood the universal fault, even now the fault among the unenlightened. Parents, being human, must have off moments; are not off moments, indeed, in the total of the day, of greater sum than moments of circumspection? It follows that if children are always with their parents, the more unlovely side cannot fail to be perceived, and, arising out of it, must follow injury by example, harm by environment, smirching of idealism, loss of respect. In those homes where the mother (in Rosalie’s phrase) is the children’s slave, why has the father the children’s greater respect? Why is it fine to do what father does? Why jolly and exciting to be with father? It is only because the father commonly is away all day, only seen by them when, shedding other affairs, he comes to see them specially.