"You should ask him about it," she said. "He must have thought it out He did not forget her. You must remember that. It was not a case of his feeling for you wiping her out of his mind. My own view is that Nature is entirely indifferent, and I don't believe parents and children do naturally and inevitably have any feeling for each other. Indeed, Nature is so indifferent that our thoughts about it are rather impertinent. It is obvious that children do not always bind men and women, and I imagine they must often have the contrary effect; always, I should say, when they have for each other only the kind of selfish affection which resents any intrusion. Surely that is why so many women turn from their husbands to their children----" The word "intrusion" brought Cathleen to the crux of her difficulty. She saw, with some exaggeration, that this was her condition, and the quality of her affection, that she had been hungering for possession of her lover with no intrusion from the past. "O Lotta," she said, "we are fools to set our faces against what cannot be altered. I thought I had broken away from narrow conventions, but I had only rid myself of the names of things, not of the things themselves, the silly pretense that people wake for a moment out of a sleep in which nothing can happen, love and go to sleep again. We are stupid, trying to keep all our loves separate. We can't do anything but stumble from one love to another, can we?" "It is what all of us do, and Nature has to take her chance. It is degrading to have one's folly and weakness, even one's mistakes, used by Nature, but that is the way of the world, and I think a real love can always get the better of it." "I have tried so hard." "You should see it from his point of view. Suppose it was you who had been trapped by Nature's indifference. You would feel hardly used if he let jealousy stand between you and him." "But René couldn't." "Perhaps. Why should _you?_ It really does hurt me to see you two wasting time and youth, two absolutely free people in a world that takes its greatest pride in its waste of opportunity. You are behaving abominably. Really, if you let him be much longer he will settle down with Mr. Casey, and discover that he can do at any rate comfortably without you, and keep you as an ideal. That happened to me when I was a girl. I let things slip by until I woke up one fine day to find that I was nothing but an ideal and had no hope of ever becoming anything else, even though I had married him. So I never did. Love changes, like everything else. It grows in us and dies. Very short is the time when it can be taken and built into our lives. If that time be let slip away then love dies down. If that happens, then life can never be anything more than amusing." "If it should be too late?" said Cathleen, alarmed. "It won't be," replied Lotta; "he has been to me and I said I would send you down to him."