"I suppose he wants to feel that he belongs to himself."
"What nonsense!" Philip was roused to the extent of making use of a colloquialism. "A child, in one sense, must always belong to the parents who brought him into the world. Why, he owes them everything—life itself. The opinions and beliefs that you talk about, can only come to him through the things they teach him or cause him to be taught."
"That," said Lily, "is why it seems to me that so many of us, of his generation, are handicapped. I mean that we were taught along certain grooves, and never told to look beyond. Never told that Truth is not to be handed on, ready-made, but must be won at individual cost. And never told, either, that free-will is the right of every human soul, and that all teaching is only preliminary to the exercise of that free-will." She stopped, deeply in earnest, and gazed at her father.
"I should like my child," she said timidly, "to feel always that he belongs to himself. That we, Nicholas and I, can only tell him that we ourselves have learnt such and such things, and then leave him also to learn them by his own experience. I shouldn't want him to take his beliefs on trust from us—or from anybody. We are not omniscient. How can we tell the aspect that the Truth is to wear for him? Only he can find that out, perhaps at the cost of many mistakes. But it seems to me that the knowledge we have won for ourselves must be a more real and lasting thing than the ready-made standards of other people."
Philip shook his grey head, and Lily saw that his worn face looked more deeply lined.
"My poor little girl, you will see it all very differently when you have your child."
With all the intensity that was in her, Lily inwardly resolved that never, through weakness or faltering of hers, should that prophecy be realized. Never, so long as the clarity of vision won at long last still remained to her, would she let sentimentality, however disguised, blind her to the rights of her child's individual soul.
To Philip she said nothing more.
He looked at her sorrowfully and pitifully, but after a little while he found, as he had always found, a fiction with which to drape the hard reality that he disliked.
"You're not yourself at present, you know, my little pet. It's very natural. Your condition.... You'll look at it all very different by-and-by."