"By showing them the door?"
"If you leave your home, it will be by your own choice and not by your mother's command," said Mrs. Barr, emphatically. "This is your home. It will remain yours so long as you keep Christian precepts. But a mother must hold the family hearth inviolate against evil doing. I cannot condone a wicked waste of the Lord's time simply because you describe the practice as a wish to be free. If you don't value a good home, you are certainly quite free to choose another."
"Why must I adopt the habits that suit your tastes and Emily's, but that are hateful to mine?"
"My child, you are flesh of my flesh—"
"All the laws and all the prophets can't justify the narrow, friendless, joyless, medieval life that you wish me to lead," cried Janet, in a passion of insurgency. "When you were young you led no such life yourself. Aunt Mary, your own sister, told me that you were the flightiest girl in the family. Your girlhood was a perpetual round of balls, theatres, parties and flirtations. Do I ask for a life of pleasure like that? No. I simply want to choose my own friends, trust to my own instincts, and follow my own bent."
This reference to her mother's youth was not a happy one. Mrs. Barr looked back on her younger days as a period of godless frivolity for which she had largely atoned by enduring with a contrite heart the double affliction of a weak husband and a wilful daughter. Her duty, as she saw it, was to keep Emily and Janet out of the primrose paths which she herself had trodden with such levity and with such disastrous results. Accordingly, Janet's presumptuous allusion merely stirred her fanaticism to its iciest depths.
"You either obey me or go," she said, with pitiless brevity.
"Oh, very well," said Janet, affecting a blitheness she was far from feeling, "I'll go."
Without another word, Mrs. Barr, weak as she was, rose and walked with a firm step to her own room. Emily, not altogether pleased with this climax, followed her immediately, giving a flabby imitation of her mother's really magnificent exit.
Janet stood nonplussed for a few seconds. Then she went upstairs to the inward refrain of: