“You don't look happy,” Mrs. Westmacott had remarked to him one morning. “You are pale and a little off color. You should come with me for a ten mile spin upon the tandem.”
“I am troubled about my girls.” They were walking up and down in the garden. From time to time there sounded from the house behind them the long, sad wail of a French horn.
“That is Ida,” said he. “She has taken to practicing on that dreadful instrument in the intervals of her chemistry. And Clara is quite as bad. I declare it is getting quite unendurable.”
“Ah, Doctor, Doctor!” she cried, shaking her forefinger, with a gleam of her white teeth. “You must live up to your principles—you must give your daughters the same liberty as you advocate for other women.”
“Liberty, madam, certainly! But this approaches to license.”
“The same law for all, my friend.” She tapped him reprovingly on the arm with her sunshade. “When you were twenty your father did not, I presume, object to your learning chemistry or playing a musical instrument. You would have thought it tyranny if he had.”
“But there is such a sudden change in them both.”
“Yes, I have noticed that they have been very enthusiastic lately in the cause of liberty. Of all my disciples I think that they promise to be the most devoted and consistent, which is the more natural since their father is one of our most trusted champions.”
The Doctor gave a twitch of impatience. “I seem to have lost all authority,” he cried.
“No, no, my dear friend. They are a little exuberant at having broken the trammels of custom. That is all.”