“That’s exaggeration, dear—which you are always protesting against in others. We are tiresome and self-willed, but we know very well how much we owe to you, and your care for us. It hurts us as much as it hurts you when we disagree; but we’ve got to live our own lives, father!”
“And you imagine that you know better how to set about it than a man who has lived more than twice as long, and has had ten times the experience?”
Margot hesitated.
“In a way—no; in a way—yes! We know ourselves, daddy, as even you cannot do, and it is impossible for one person, however kind and wise he may be, to lay down the law as to what is to be the object of other lives. We all have our own ambitions; what could satisfy one, would leave another empty and aching. Agnes, for instance, and me! How different we are! Her idea of happiness would be a house worked by machinery, where every hour the same things happened at precisely the same moment, and there were never any cataracts and breaks, and nobody ever came down late to breakfast. I should like to have breakfast in bed, and a new excitement every single day! We are not all cut out of one pattern, and we are not children any longer, dear. Sometimes you forget that. When you were twenty-three, you were married, and had a home of your own.”
“Ron is not twenty-one.”
“When you were twenty-one, did you want your own way, or were you willing for other people to decide for you?”
Mr Vane sighed, and moved his head impatiently.
“Here we are back again at the same old argument! It’s waste of time, Margot. I can’t alter my ideas, but I’ll try to keep a tighter rein over myself for the next few months. We mustn’t have any more scenes like to-night.”
“No.” Margot spoke as gravely as himself. “We mustn’t, daddy, for your sake as well as ours, and therefore I think it wise to remove the cause of your irritation. You said we might go away to the country together, Ron and I, and we have decided on Scotland—on a glen in Perthshire, six miles from the nearest station, where the landlady of a quaint little inn takes in a few boarders. It will be very primitive, I expect, and we shall live on cream and porridge and mountain air, and grow brown and bonnie, and study Nature as we have never had a chance of doing before. Six miles from a station, daddy! There’s seclusion, if you like!”
Mr Vane knitted his brow, uncertain whether to approve or object.