The home birds were not all of them content with light household duties and, for pleasure, the choir practices and tea-drinkings and village concerts their mothers in their time had found sufficient amusement. A few of the boldest among them were already beginning to talk about their right to live their own lives as they wished. According to them, their parents’ old-fashioned ideas were their main obstacle. “Pa’s so old-fashioned. You’d think he had been born in the year dot,” these would say. “And Mama’s not much better. She’d like us to talk prunes and prisms and be indoors by ten o’clock and never so much as look at a fellow before he had shown her a certificate of good character.” Far from feeling under any obligation to those who had brought them up and, as Laura in her inexperience thought, been so generous to them, they seemed to think their parents existed chiefly to give them whatever they happened to wish for most at the moment—one of the new safety bicycles, or a sealskin coat, or an outing to London. The parents, on their side, preached circumspect behaviour, obedience, and gratitude as a daughter’s first duties, and many clashes ensued.

“I didn’t ask to be born, did I?” one girl reported herself as saying to her father, and his retort, “No; and if you had you wouldn’t have been if I had known as much about you as I do now,” was repeated by her as an instance of the ignorance and brutality with which she had to contend.

“Straining at the leash, I am. Straining at the leash,” said Alma dramatically when telling the story to Laura, and Laura, looking round the pretty bedroom and at the new summer outfit, complete with white kid gloves and a parasol, laid out on the bed for her admiring inspection, thought that, at least, the leash was a handsome one. But she did not say so, for even she, brought up in a harder school, could understand that it must be annoying to be treated as a child at twenty, and to be forbidden to do this or do that because it was “not the thing,” and have to depend for every little thing on a parent’s generosity.

But the rebellious daughter was the exception. Most of the girls Laura knew were contented with their lot. They enjoyed helping in the house and making Mama bring it up to date and giving tea-parties and playing the piano. Some of these were of the type then called “sunbeams in the home”: good, affectionate, home-loving girls, obviously created for marriage, and most of them did marry and, there can be no doubt, made excellent wives for their own male counterparts.