It's a commonplace of parenting and

It's a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. As a parent, you never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners - these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who's coming to live with you is chance. Cheerful or neurotic, line 5 kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can line 7 let you off the hook. The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; when two line 8 entirely different people emerge from their roughly similar chances in life.
Here in the cavernous basement kitchen at 3.55 a.m., in a single pool of light, as though on stage, isTheo Perowne, eighteen years old, his formal education already long behind him, reclining on a tilted-back kitchen chair, his legs in tight black jeans, his feet in boots of soft black leather (paid for with his own money) crossed on the edge of the table. As unlike his sister Daisy as randomness will allow. He's drinking from a large tumbler of water. In the other hand he holds the folded-back music magazine he's reading. A studded leather jacket lies in a heap on the floor. Propped against a cupboard is his guitar in its case. It's already acquired a few steamer trunk labels-Trieste, Oakland, Hamburg, Val d'lsere. There's space for more. From a compact stereo player on a shelf above a library of cookery books comes the sound, like soft drizzle, of an all-night pop station.
Henry Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician. He himself was simply processed, without question or complaint, in a polished continuum from school, through medical school, to the dogged acquisition of clinical experience, in London, Southend-on-Sea, Newcastle, Bellevue Emergency Department in New York and London again. How have he and Rosalind, such dutiful, conventional types, given rise to such a free spirit?