Freedom to begin again! Who knew what life might yet hold, with the gain of bitter and profound experience behind her, and the potent, incalculable fact of a freed spirit before her?
She had learnt honesty at last, and at last the gaze of her soul was steady.
"The very beginning of it all, when they made me believe myself in love with Nicholas, and I hadn't the courage to own to myself that I wasn't! Or perhaps it goes further back even than that, back to the time when Vonnie and I were little. Vonnie, my Vonnie, shall I ever love anyone again? Vonnie knew the truth about values; she knew what mattered to her and what didn't. Perhaps I did too—I think I did when we were little, but afterwards I took my values ready-made. One can't do that. Humbug brings its own penalty—my life since I've grown up here has been just that—Humbug. Yes, and long before I was grown-up, too."
Wandering from the bewilderment of her own life, Lily thought of the problem of education.
Wherein lay the failure of one generation to render enduring help to another?
"It isn't love—the lack of it. They do love—so do we. Is it the old, possessive idea? Children belonging to their parents? They don't belong. Each soul belongs to itself—I'm certain of that. The parents have responsibility, at first, yes—they brought one into the world for their own pleasure, or because they thought it right, or because they couldn't help it. They have to keep their children alive—to do the best they can for them—to tell them the truth as far as they know it. And that's what they don't do. They tell the children what they think is good for them to know.... They arrogate to themselves the right of claiming infallibility. And they're not infallible—they know they're not. But they won't let the children know it. And so they evade, and deceive, and suppress, and the children grow up and find that there is no infallibility—but by that time they have learnt to evade, and deceive, and suppress, themselves."
Her heart smote her.
"Even now, it hurts me to think what I know is true. My instinct is to take refuge in the old idea of loyalty. Yet I know that it's only another word for sentimentality—for a wilful obscuring of facts."
Words came unsought into her mind.
"The truth shall make you free." Truth leading to Freedom. The two gifts that were withheld.