He was silent for a moment, as if undecided what to say next. She glanced at him surreptitiously, and took in all the details of his attire—the high white collar, the dark tweed suit obviously of American origin, the thin silver chain that emerged from beneath his waistcoat and disappeared on a curve into the hip pocket of his trousers, the boots with their long pointed toes. His heavy moustache, and the smooth bluish chin, struck her as ideally masculine.
'No parents,' he burst out, 'no parents can see things from their children's point of view.'
'Oh!' she protested. 'There are times when I feel so like my daughters that I am them.'
He nodded. 'Yes,' he said, abandoning his position at once, 'I can believe that. You're an exception. If I hadn't sort of known all the time that you were, I wouldn't be here now talking like this.'
'It's so accidental, the whole business,' she remarked, branching off to another aspect of the case in order to mask the confusion caused by the sincere flattery in his voice. 'It was only by chance that Milly had that particular part at all. Suppose she hadn't had it. What then?'
'Everything's accidental,' he replied. 'Everything that ever happened is accidental, in a way—in another it isn't. If you look at your own life, for instance, you'll find it's been simply a series of coincidences. I'm sure mine has been. Sheer chance from beginning to end.'
'Yes,' she said thoughtfully, and put her chin in the palm of her left hand.
'And as for the stage, why, nearly every one goes on the stage by chance. It just occurs, that's all. And moreover I guarantee that the parents of fifty per cent. of all the actresses now on the boards began by thinking what a terrible blow it was to them that their daughters should want to do that. Can't you see what I mean?' He emphasised his words more and more. 'I'm certain you can.'
She signified assent. It seemed to her, as he continued to talk, that for the first time she was listening to natural convincing common sense in that home of hers, where existence was governed by precedent and by conventional ideas and by the profound parental instinct which meets all requests with a refusal. It seemed to her that her children, though to outward semblance they had much freedom, had never listened to anything but 'No,' 'No, dear,' 'Of course you can't,' 'I think you had better not,' and 'Once for all, I forbid it.' She wondered why this should have been so, and why its strangeness had not impressed her before. She had a distant fleeting vision of a household in which parents and children behaved like free and sensible human beings, instead of like the virtuous and the martyrised puppets of a terrible system called 'acting for the best.' And she thought again what an extraordinary man Arthur Twemlow was, strong-minded, clear-headed, sympathetic, and delightful. She enjoyed intensely the sensation of their intimacy.
'Jack will never agree,' she said, when she could say nothing else.