Fathers and mothers who have ruled by
authority (let it be as loving as you please, it will still remain an
arbitrary rule) in the beginning, never seem to know when their children
are children no longer, but have become men and women. In any average
family, the position of an unmarried daughter after she is twenty years
old becomes less and less what it should be. In case of sons, the question
is rarely a practical one; in those exceptional instances where invalidism
or some other disability keeps a man helpless for years under his father's
roof, his very helplessness is at once his vindication and his shield, and
also prevents his feeling manly revolt against the position of unnatural
childhood. But in the case of daughters it is very different. Who does not
number in his circle of acquaintance many unmarried women, between the
ages of thirty and forty, perhaps even older, who have practically little
more freedom in the ordering of their own lives than they had when they
were eleven? The mother or the father continues just as much the
autocratic centre of the family now as of the nursery, thirty years
before.
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