All true growth is from within, outward. In the tree, natural law
prevents distortion or exaggeration of one part over another. In
your case reason, conscience, good taste, must supervise and direct
natural impulses. Thus following nature you become natural, and
cease to be conventional. If you don't do this you will be either
conventional or queer. Do you understand me?"

"I think I begin to. Let me see if I do. Let me apply your words to
one definite problem,--How can I be more helpful and companionable
to you?"

"Why, Marian, do you not see how infinitely more to me you are
already, although scarcely beyond the wish to be different from
what you were? I have talked to you as a man talks to a woman in the
dearest and most unselfish relation of life. There is one thing,
however, you never can know, and that is a father's love for a
daughter: it is essentially a man's love and a man's experience. I
am sure it is very different from the affection I should have for
a son, did I possess one. Ever since you were a baby the phrase,
'my little girl,' has meant more than you can ever know; and now
when you come voluntarily to my side in genuine sympathy, and seek
to enter INTELLIGENTLY into that which makes my life, you change
everything for the better, precisely as that which was in cold,
gray shadow before is changed by sunlight. You add just so much by
your young, fresh, womanly life to my life, and it is all the more
welcome because it is womanly and different from mine. You cease
to be a child, a dependant to be provided for, and become a friend,
an inspiration, a confidante. These relations may count little to
heavy, stolid, selfish men, to whom eating, drinking, excitement,
and money-making are the chief considerations, but to men of mind