I like children pretty well but I don't want to be a governess and teach other people's children; I want to be taught myself; I want to learn--I'm a sort of a child, too, dear; and it's the familiarity with wiser people and brighter people and pleasant surroundings that has made me as happy as I am--given me what I never had as a child.

You don't understand, but I'm having my childhood now--nursery, kindergarten, parties, boarding-school, finishing school, debut--all concentrated into this happy year of being among gay, clever, animated people." "Yet you will not let me take you into a world which is still pleasanter--" And the eternal discussion immediately became inevitable, tiring both with its earnestness and its utter absence of a common ground.

Because in him apparently remained every vital germ of convention and of generations of training in every precept of formality; and in her--for with Valerie West adolescence had arrived late--that mystery had been responsible for far-reaching disturbances consequent on the starved years of self-imprisonment, of exaltations suppressed, of fears and doubts and vague desires and dreams ineffable possessing the silence of a lonely soul.
And so, essentially solitary, inevitably lonely, out of her own young heart and an untrained mind she was evolving a code of responsibility to herself and to the world.
Her ethics and her morals were becoming what wide, desultory, and unrestrained reading was making them; her passion for happiness and for truth, her restless intelligence, were prematurely forming her character.

There was no one in authority to tell her--check, guide, or direct her in the revolt from dogmatism, pedantry, sophistry and conventionalism.

And by this path youthful intelligence inevitably passes, incredulous of snare and pitfall where lie the bones of many a savant under magic blossoms nourished by creeds long dead.
"To bring no sorrow to any one, Louis--that is the way I am trying to live," she said, seriously.
"You are bringing it to me." "If that is so--then I had better depart as I came and leave you in peace." "It's too late." "Perhaps it is not.