“But you protest that you did it out of kindness, and because you wanted them to have a real good time.  My good Alpha, it is absurd for a man to argue that he cut off a woman’s hands out of kindness.  Human beings are so incredulous, so apt to think evil, that such arguments somehow fail to carry conviction.  I am fairly credulous myself, but even I decline to accept the plea.  And I say that if your conduct was meant kindly, it is a pity that you weren’t born cruel.  Cruelty would have been better.  Was it out of kindness that you refused to allow your youngest to acquire the skill to earn her own living?  Was it out of kindness that you thwarted her instinct and filled her soul with regret that may be eternal?  It was not.  I have already indicated, in speaking of your son, one of the real reasons.  Another was that you took pride in having these purely ornamental and loving creatures about you, and you would not suffer them to have an interest stronger than their interest in you, or a function other than the function of completing your career and illustrating your success in the world.  If the girl was to play the piano, she was to play it in order to perfect your home and minister to your pleasure and your vanity, and for naught else.  You got what you wanted, and you infamously shut your eyes to the risks.

“I hear you expostulate that you didn’t shut your eyes to the risks, and that there will always be risks, and that it is impossible to provide fully against all of them.

“Which is true, or half true, and the truth or half-truth of the statement only renders your case the blacker, O Alpha!  Risks are an inevitable part of life.  They are part of the fine savour and burden of life, and without the sense of them life is flat and tasteless.  And yet you feigned to your women that risk was eliminated from the magic world in which you had put them.  You deliberately deprived them of the most valuable factor in existence—­genuine responsibility.  You made them ridiculous in the esteem of all persons with a just perception of values.  You slowly bled them of their self-respect.  Had you been less egotistic, they might have been happier, even during your lifetime.  Your wife would have been happier had she been permitted or compelled to feel the weight of the estate and to share understandingly the anxieties of your wonderful business.  Your girls would have been happier had they been cast forcibly out of the magic world into the real world for a few hours every day during a few years in order to learn its geography, and its customs, and the terms on which food and raiment and respect can be obtained in it, and the ability to obtain them.  And so would you have been happier, fool!  You sent your girls on the grand tour, but you didn’t send them into the real world.