His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure and good for life.  He made this simple classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held that the two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from one another.  Women are made like the potter’s vessels—­either for worship or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels.  He had never wanted daughters.  Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom.  He was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved his dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a real vein of passion in his sentiment.  But he had always felt (he had never allowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their family was a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion.  He had, however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certain human amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these.  One was in the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor business.  The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother’s care.

He had no ideas about daughters.  They happen to a man.

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough.  It runs about gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous quantities of soft hair and more power of expressing affection than its brothers.  It is a lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures.  It makes wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good enough for Punch.  You call it a lot of nicknames—­“Babs” and “Bibs” and “Viddles” and “Vee”; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back.  It loves to sit on your knee.  All that is jolly and as it should be.

But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another.  There one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never thought out.  When he found himself thinking about it, it upset him so that he at once resorted to distraction.  The chromatic fiction with which he relieved his mind glanced but slightly at this aspect of life, and never with any quality of guidance.  Its heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other people’s.  The one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was that it had rather a light way with parental rights.  His instinct was in the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his declining years just as he thought fit.  About this conception of ownership he perceived and desired a certain sentimental glamour, he liked everything properly dressed, but it remained ownership.