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He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.
Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs
about gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous
quantities of soft hair and more power of expressing affection
than its brothers. It is a lovely little appendage to the mother
who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her,
gestures with her very gestures. It makes wonderful sentences
that you can repeat in the City and are good enough for Punch.
You call it a lot of nicknames--"Babs" and "Bibs" and "Viddles"
and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back. It
loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should
be.
But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another.
There one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never
thought out. When he found himself thinking about it, it upset
him so that he at once resorted to distraction. The chromatic
fiction with which he relieved his mind glanced but slightly at
this aspect of life, and never with any quality of guidance. Its
heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other people's. The
one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was that it
had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was in
the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property,
bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a
comfort in his declining years just as he thought fit. About
this conception of ownership he perceived and desired a certain
sentimental glamour, he liked everything properly dressed, but it
remained ownership. Ownership seemed only a reasonable return
for the cares and expenses of a daughter's upbringing. Daughters
were not like sons. He perceived, however, that both the novels
he read and the world he lived in discountenanced these
assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place, and they
remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and the
old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent
dependents--which is absurd. One married as he wished and one
against his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little
Vee, discontented with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home,
going about with hatless friends to Socialist meetings and
art-class dances, and displaying a disposition to carry her
scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths. She seemed to think
he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means of her
freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened
security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled
classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume
and spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle
girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!
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