Oh, she must prevent it! 'Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was she not ?' she said, forcing herself to speak in her most everyday tones.
He controlled himself with a mighty effort.
'Since I became a Fellow.

We have been alone in the world so long.

We have never been able to do without each other.' 'Isn't it wonderful to you ?' said Catherine, after a little electric pause--and her voice was steadier and clearer than it had been since the beginning of their conversation--'how little the majority of sons and daughters regard their parents when they come to grow up and want to live their own lives?
The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to throw off their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them--decently, of course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them.

All the long years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.' He looked at her quickly--a troubled, questioning look.
'It is so, often; but not, I think, where the parents have truly understood their problem.

The real difficulty for father and mother is not childhood, but youth; how to get over that difficult time when the child passes into the man or woman, and a relation of governor and governed should become the purest and closest of friendships.