Fatherhood Quote by Evelyn Underhill

A chill parent-child relationship can teach you the wrong lesson: that numbness is maturity. Underhill’s sentence catches the moment before that lesson hardens into a personality. The phrasing is quietly surgical. “Met by coolness and indifference” frames the father’s distance as climate, not event: an atmosphere she has to breathe. Then comes the moral danger, not of anger but of imitation. “Constantly tempted” makes emotional withdrawal sound like a vice with a pull, suggesting how easily self-protection masquerades as dignity.

The real turn is her use of spiritual vocabulary without piety. Calling it “a test” reassigns agency. If her father’s behavior is the weather, the test is what she does inside it. Underhill doesn’t deny the difficulty; she refuses to grant it the last word. “If I could take it rightly” is the key clause: it implies there is a wrong way to suffer coolness (becoming cool), and a right way that preserves warmth without naïveté. The subtext is self-discipline, but also a subtle refusal to center the father as judge and jury of her emotional life.

Context matters. Underhill is best known for writing about mysticism and interior transformation in early 20th-century Britain, a culture that prized restraint and often dressed emotional silence as virtue. Here, she flips that script: restraint is not the goal, integrity is. The sentence reads like a private ethical drill - a rehearsal for meeting indifference with something sturdier than reflex.