For they had not been brought up at all.

They were in the immortal position of Topsy, which is not such a comfortable position as some admirers of Self-Realization would have us believe. A weed on a rubbish heap grows up in grand, unrestricted freedom and may be very comfortable, but the children of a bitterly unhappy marriage, who have had ample chance to develop as they please, are profoundly uncomfortable.

Weeds may wander, but children need authority, guidance and answers to their questions, because children have souls which can develop, and weeds have not.

The wild, free-weedy system of upbringing had a really good try-out on the young Gardens, but the results would scarcely have pleased one of the advocates of the New Freedom.

Were they sane, gay, balanced, kind, and capable of managing a series of experimental love affairs with gallant yet tender ease?

They were not. Sophia judged the visible world very harshly and liked nothing better than to escape into her private world of dreams. As for love, she hardly thought about it; and normal girls of twenty usually think about it a great deal. Harry was so calmly sure that his beauty would win him fame and the worship of thousands of girls that he never thought about hard work and perseverance. Francis liked to dramatize his feelings and feel fierce and lone-wolfish; he enjoyed disliking people, especially relations. And all three were as moody, sensitive and quick-witted as show cats; they had hardly any of the virtues which would fit them for citizenship in a brave new world.

But these were small faults compared with their lack of standards.

All their short lives they had seen gentleness oppressed, beauty ignored, and order thrust aside in favour of chaos. The most beautiful object in their daily lives had been their mother, and her life had been a bondage to misery. They all reverenced gentleness and beauty, and Sophia had already resolved that she would try to mould her own life to include these qualities, but the daily spectacle of the apparent powerlessness of virtue had sunk deeply into their minds.

They took it for granted that life should be ugly and harsh, as more fortunate children assume that life is delightful. They intended to escape from that harshness in time, if it were possible, and to enjoy themselves in their own way, but they did not rebel against the misery of their home life because they were inured to it, and even found some of its aspects funny. Pope’s bitter saying about the monster who is endured, pitied and embraced was true of the young Gardens and the cruelty of life. They grew up surrounded by it, and therefore could not utterly avoid absorbing its taint.

Sophia was the most fortunate of the three, because she was a child of love and hope. She grew up in the wreck of hope and the slow, strange living death of love, but because she was conceived in love, she was the happiest of the three, and she never forgot it.