When Lawrence went back to Europe for good in 1925, it meant a return to Frieda's children. He had always steadily opposed the idea that a family was what sex, and by extension marriage, was really for. That Frieda could never quite recover from having been forced to leave her three offspring behind when she parted from her husband enraged him. She had made a crucial life decision to commit herself to him, he felt, and ought to be prepared to accept the consequences without repining. Explaining his refusal to accompany her on her trip back from New York in 1923 he wrote to Murry, ‘F. wants to see her children. And you know, wrong or not, I can't stomach the chasing of those Weekley children’. Yet once he was back in Europe permanently, and his wife's son and daughters had turned into young adults, he gradually found he got on with them quite well. This was particularly the case with the youngest, Barbara, or Barby as she was always known. The most rebellious of the three, and the one whom her father felt was most likely to have inherited Frieda's ‘bad blood’ (she had been expelled from her English public school for drawing male nudes in a textbook), Barby became an art student and saw a lot of her mother and second husband. It was through her that Lawrence was able to increase his knowledge of the post-war ‘flapper’ generation, with its cropped hair for women, fashions in which far more flesh was exposed than had ever been the case in the recent past, apparently wild, orgiastic dances, and a much more relaxed attitude to the mingling of the sexes. The consequence was a number of short stories and articles by Lawrence in his last years in which he expressed limited approval of a relaxation in the standards that had been set by people like his mother in the years before the war but, at the same time, scepticism about the authenticity of the new openness, and an anxious conservatism as to where it would all lead.