She felt like a man who for many months has moved on crutches and finds himself suddenly bereft of them, helpless, without support ...
But was it fair?—fair to Jill. The star had been her husband's gift—she had meant to leave it to her child.
The fight began. In reality, it resolved itself into a choice between the pair—Stephen, her friend, and Jill ... that "independent" daughter.
The adjective betrayed her mood.
For, proud as she was in her mother's heart of the bright young girl with her clever brain, the rankling fact was hidden there—her offspring had outgrown the nest.
She could not realize that the age was mainly responsible for the lack of what she called "proper respect"—that mid-Victorian subservience.
She held that what she considered fit was the natural guidance for the girl; that the latter should shape her every thought in the mould of the past generation.
Yet she, herself, had broken loose. It did not occur to her to weigh the question of militant suffrage in the same scales her own mother had used...
Marriage had given her the right to an independent judgment, she thought—the full authority of the woman.
She did not see that life had changed. That the youth of to-day asserted their claim to a freedom of thought unknown in her time, upheld by a sounder education.