THE ENGLISH MOTHER
When a woman has begun to speak and think in terms of “your father”
as well as of “my husband,” she has not merely extended the sphere of
her interpretership, but has assumed a new personality in addition to
any that she may have had before, the personality of the mother. The
extension of the interpretership, which is one of the responsibilities
of the added personality, is in itself not unimportant. In the outer
world the wife-interpreter has not to create an entire character, but
to give a greater reality to an already well apprehended external
appearance, and that only in the direction of increasing its amenity.
The mother has to create the father for the children progressively,
timing the stages of the structure to the expansion of their
intelligence, and she has to awake in them not only a sense of his
beauty, goodness and power, but of his displeasure, his wisdom even in
denial, and the sanctity of his preoccupations. This task is not too
easy, however lightly and inevitably it is undertaken. The beneficent
deity, so soon to dwindle in stature to that of an ordinary man, is
not hidden, as it is wise for deities to be, so that if the artistic
imagination be stretched too far in his creation, the discrepancies
between the living person and the created being become sufficiently
glaring to strike even a childish apprehension. The woman who creates
the father with tact, giving the impression of removing rather than
giving false impressions, is a valuable wife and an excellent mother.
It is difficult for a man to reveal himself to a child, unless he has a
peculiarly expansive disposition, and, with the best will in the world
to stand before his offspring on his own legs, he is bound to depend to
some extent—though some men are far more lazy than others—upon wifely
interpretation. But the interpreter must be wary lest she is caught
by keen little eyes in the act of booming out oracles from behind a
hollow image, for no discovery is more disillusioning; nor must she
officiously intervene if the hardy growing intellect demands a directer
communication with the source of all wisdom. The temptation to say:
“don’t bother Daddy, he’s busy” is not always due to entirely unselfish
promptings. It is better for a child that the direct revelations should
come in the shape of mysteriously expressed riddles than that they
should be repressed by intervention from the sanctuary, for the riddle,
if a good one, may bear unconscious fruit, whereas silence may lead
to disappointment and an estrangement which can never afterwards be
overcome. There are fathers who, at a certain stage, can step blandly
down from the high place, incarnating themselves as it were, and take
the novice by the hand which will rest in his as long as may be: there
are other fathers who can never quite leave the steps of their own
altar. The difference is a matter of temperament. Yet, in either case,
the ultimate relations between father and children will depend upon
the mother’s tact, sympathy, and power of divination in the earliest
stages. Any flaw in her own understanding will here be visited with
punishment.
The Englishwoman brings a considerable amount of acumen into her
parental interpretership, though it consists, perhaps, more in her
acute comprehension of a child’s imagination than in profundity of
psychological analysis of her husband’s character. She has a natural
gift for attaining the confidence of children, putting things to them
in the manner least calculated to cause doubt or dismay. Her own
illogical mind protects them from the devastating effects of logic
upon too tender susceptibilities. I remember so well a father who
set out one winter’s evening in pure kindness of heart to teach two
daughters the rudiments of whist. All went well, if rather silently,
till an awful moment when in a majestic voice—intended purely as a
warning and not as a reproof—the father uttered the words: “Why on
earth did you trump your partner’s best card?” The reply was a flood
of tears and a hasty call for female intervention. Mother would have
conveyed the warning with less emphasis and more prolixity, but she
would have preserved a disposition for whist which was then and there
for ever shattered. These are the domestic pitfalls against which she
has to guard, as the speaking tube through which father and children
communicate, a speaking tube shortening ever with the years till its
use becomes quite unnecessary.
But motherhood is more than this: it is a new personality put on with
pain, worn with mingled joy and anxiety, only to be put off with
death. Its qualities are universal, and there would be only idleness
in an elaborate attempt to ascribe any particular maternal character
to the English, as opposed to any other, mother. She is but one of
the world of mothers with all their virtues, pleasures and sorrows,
as deeply moved by the mystery, as keenly wounded by the arrows, as
proudly equal to the sacrifices of motherhood as a woman of another
nation. Nationality does not enter into motherhood, which is a function
of universal humanity, so well understood that, instead of being
emotionally exhaustive on the subject, I have only to refer each
reader to the memories of his or her own heart, where childhood, if
not marriage also, has stored some of its most precious secrets. There
may be degrees of motherly feeling, for instance between the hen with
a brood and the cow with a single calf,—a contrast which has its human
counterpart—but for all mothers the essential quality is that of the
pelican. I need say no more than that English mothers make the most
admirable pelicans, sparing themselves no more and devoting themselves
no less than those of other nations. In no country, therefore, is
the mother more honoured or cherished: and if the tie that binds a
man to his mother in later life is less emotionally strong than with
some Latin nations, it is because an Englishman directs his emotions
habitually along different channels, not because his heart is devoid
of a very precious memory, indelibly enshrined. But it is possible to
over-sentimentalise this theme by dwelling on it. Certain passages in
“Pendennis” come to my mind as I write the words in which Thackeray
pulls out the “vox pathetica” in reflecting on the relations between
Arthur and his mother. When one is treated to voluntaries of this
kind one has an irresistible inclination to be horrid and realistic,
remembering that in England, as in all other countries, there are
mothers who do not deserve the name, that baby clinics would be not
so urgently necessary in our big towns if all mothering were perfect,
and that Samuel Butler wrote a book called “The Way of All Flesh,”
which is a strong-tasting antidote to any overdoses of sentiment in
the matter of parenthood. How Thackeray would have disliked that book!
Yet the truth in it will live as long as “Pendennis.” Lately, however,
what with “Fanny’s First Play,” “The Younger Generation” and the like,
dilutions of this truth have been a little too freely administered: so
I prefer to leave the ultimate moralisings to the individual.
A boy of six whom once I knew, when his mother prepared to teach
him to read, countered her with the grave announcement that, in his
opinion, “mothers were not meant to teach.” It is a more reasonable
view than appears at first sight, at all events for English children.
To them the combination of intense love and a desire to teach is too
overwhelming: they prefer a more dispassionate interest in a matter
which seems to them one in which all emotion may conveniently be
avoided. It is too much at an immature age to be called on to respond
to an intellectual and an emotional stimulus combined, and it is
unfair from a child’s point of view to be made to feel that laziness
or inaccuracy, periodical faults in all of us, are not only faults
but failures in devotion towards those for whom devotion is a natural
habit. Most English parents, though after some ineffectual struggles
against this natural reluctance, acquiesce in the truth of it. The time
of the Goodchilds has gone by, and education has been much improved.
The acquiescence—to tell the truth—is apt to go too far, and the
process of education is left to machines called teachers without any
interest at all on the part of the parents. The English mother, I
think, is little preoccupied about education. To her it is only one of
the many processes of equipment necessary for a child in its passage
to an age of discretion—a more elaborate process for boys than for
girls, but likely to bring more tangible results. About material and
physical well-being she will occupy herself endlessly, to the dismay of
masters and matrons, but she will pay comparatively small attention to
the development of an intellect, unless her own is exceptionally well
developed, in comparison to the development of muscle and character.
If her children respond feebly to the teaching they are given, she
will resign herself, not without a secret sympathy for them, to having
stupid children, but without inquiring whether possibly there is some
psychological trouble at the bottom of this failure, which a new
adjustment and fresh guidance might overcome: if, on the other hand,
the response is conspicuously successful, she rather wistfully regards
the soaring of their young intellects beyond her ken, wondering “how
she came to have such clever children.”
Cleverness is a horrible word, much overworked in England: it may mean
nothing but an aptitude for passing examinations with credit. She is
certainly right to regard this aptitude as unimportant, but she is
wrong where so often she remains indifferent while a really promising
mind is slowly ruined by unsuitable teaching or unsuitable food. Few
English mothers—I suspect the French of surpassing them here—manage to
keep their children’s confidence in this matter. The play-hours and
the friendships of school are inexhaustible subjects of conversation,
but lessons quickly come under the head of things not talked about,
except in a jocular way or in passing, rather embarrassed, reference.
Even the best of mothers is at a disadvantage here, at least where
a son is concerned, a fact cleverly illustrated in Mr Arnold Lunn’s
novel “Loose Ends.” New interests, new views expressed by new human
beings seize hold of him with violence, bursting in on the old close
community of two, and leaving the more stable of the couple out in the
cold, irritatingly faced with inability to “keep up,” though conscious
all the while of no difficulty in keeping up anywhere else in the
wide world. Here again, it is often her very passion which throws
her out of the race with less devoted rivals: boys and girls can be
intellectually as well as morally tiresome, and they feel the need for
being able to indulge their tiresomeness without giving pain. As one of
my friends put it: “I never talk about these things at home, it always
leads to ‘Grief’.” Good schoolmasters and all schoolboys know that
“grief” is fatal in the realm of ideas. Few parents can repress ‘grief’
with success, and they must pay the penalty for their over-lively
concern. Their only remedy, unless they are content to relapse in their
children’s eyes into dear old back numbers, is to wait till the ferment
has settled down: “grief” will then neither be so frequent nor so
difficult to overcome.
* * * * *
It is the mother more than the father who makes, and who is, the home.
Her influence upon her children is incalculable, but surely it is going
a little too far, especially in the case of boys, to say that during
the time of their education they should not leave home or lose the
influence of home. During the controversy over Mr Alec Waugh’s “Loom of
Youth,” Sir Sydney Olivier wrote to the _Nation_ a letter in which were
these words:
“No parent should be allowed to send his boy to school in a boarding
house without special excuse any more than to send him to a private
lunatic asylum.”
This very dogmatic assertion leaves out of account one of what seem to
be the undisputed advantages of public school education, the advantage
of living in an orderly and disciplined community for a greater part
of the years of later boyhood. There will always be exceptional boys
to whom this life is not appropriate, but for the majority of boys
it is both beneficial and enjoyable. It might even be said that the
majority of boys demand it. Even the holders of opposite views agree
that it is an infinitely better system for boys from inadequate homes
than the day school. In my opinion, the definition of an inadequate
home would be a very wide one, and likely to remain so in spite of
all possible advances in the way of greater social equality and
uniformity. The Montessori system is based on the belief that the home,
which is organised for the convenience of its adult inhabitants, cannot
give the requisite attention and liberty to children, who are slow in
action, capricious and inexperienced: home life to young children, in
this view, is both too protective and too restrictive. For different
reasons there is a case to be made out for holding that, as a rule,
the home is not properly organised for the advantage, out of school
hours, of growing boys between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. All
parents are naturally anxious to prepare their children for life in
the world, to enlighten them in their difficulties and aid the opening
of their minds, but it remains sadly true that most of them find their
incapability of fulfilling this natural function only too soon. As a
well known man of letters said to me recently: “Yes, the boys have got
to go to school. My wife and I started with all sorts of jolly ideas
about keeping them at home and educating them ourselves. But we found
it was no good. They said they wanted to go to school, and so they
must.”
As I said above, there is something antipathetic to the young in
learning from those whom they love: they would rather be controlled
and taught by those for whom they have no primary affection. Besides,
it must be confessed that parents have other shortcomings, all the
shortcomings of varied human nature, which are perfectly patent to the
uncanny acuteness of children. The father and mother whose influence
during the critical years of childhood and adolescence would be
nothing but good are extremely rare. Parents, for one thing, can so
seldom hit the mean between taking too much interest and too little.
Indifference means either undue indulgence or undue restriction;
too great interest leads either to jealousy of other influences, to
hampering independence, to surrounding a boy with a close atmosphere
of emotion from which he would give anything to get away. Boys like to
be treated calmly, to be rewarded calmly and to be punished calmly:
they are unemotional creatures whom school suits well in this respect.
The continued society of ideal parents may be ideal for a boy, but
where parents fall short of the ideal, it is questionable whether
their continued society is a good thing: and they may be sure that
their lapses will be judged by their children with all the cruelty of
innocence and ignorance.
Holidays, to which the boys come back full of affection and pleasant
anticipation, are quite long enough to give the good mother and father
all the chance they need if they will only take it, to say nothing of
the influence of letters. How different is the eagerness with which
at a boarding school a boy looks for the letters bearing the well
known handwriting of his mother to the apathy with which any home
bred boy must regard the daily prospect of banalities over the family
tea-table! As a matter of fact, the opportunities of the holidays are
too often neglected. It is then that enthusiasm may be reinforced and
new interests aroused to counteract the routine and convention which
is the chief fault of our schools to-day. Too many parents think their
duties are limited then to giving their children enjoyment, forgetting
that theirs is the responsibility for sending their boys back to school
not one whit more developed or improved than when they left its gates
some weeks earlier. This very failure shows the difficulty of home
education: the boarding school is organised purely for the advantage
of the boys, while in the home the convenience of the parents must be
competitive, even where it is not paramount. The interests of young
and old cannot possibly entirely coincide, and it would be foolish
for parents who, after all, have their own lives to lead and their
own developments to be pursued, to sacrifice their time and their
arrangements altogether for the sake of their children. To what
lengths an English mother will go in this direction many a son will
confess, remembering his own insensibility at the moment: but it would
be bad that she should be tempted to go too far or be forced, on the
other hand, into a habit of indifference through having continually to
restrain her natural impulse of devotion in the general interests of
the whole household.
Another argument for entirely home education is the moral one. It is
one of the most powerful in its appeal to mothers, to whom the idea of
adolescent impurity is revolting. Personally, I cannot see any reason
for supposing that the temptations of an adolescent male, which are
absolutely inevitable, will be any less violent at home than at school.
The mother of a French boy certainly does not believe that they are,
and does not act on that assumption. So far as strength to resist
temptations goes, the influence of judicious parents on boys at school
is, as I know perfectly well, quite as strong and quite as successful
as it could have been if the boys had never left their sight. Besides,
there are few mothers who can resist a kind of morbid spying on their
children as they first come into contact with physical experience of
their sex. Nothing could possibly be more irritating for a boy, and it
may lead him into foolishness out of more defiance and desperation. It
is a thorny time for both parties to the relationship, and happy are
those mothers and sons who come out of it with mutual love and respect
undiminished. Sir Sydney Olivier, to judge from another passage in the
letter already referred to, would like the morals of boys to be saved
and their sentimental education completed by love affairs with mature
females. Such affairs are, no doubt, extremely valuable in certain
cases. As Rousseau said in his Confessions: “Il est certain que les
entretiens intéressants et sensés d’une femme de mérite sont plus
propres à former un jeune homme que toute la pédantesque philosophie
des livres.” But he also allowed still closer relations with Madame
de Warens to be included in his own scheme of development. It is to
be doubted if England is suited to this form of education. Certainly
few English mothers would regard without intense suspicion the ideal
and elderly Egeria, who is to absorb usefully and harmlessly all the
superfluous sentimental energy of their beloved son. Their hearts are
so terribly vulnerable in this respect, poor things, for they hate
physical truths and love sentimental pruderies. Only the best of them
really look things in the face and say to their boys: “Look here, I
know how things are. You are growing up and I sympathise deeply with
all your feelings and temptations. I have always tried to teach you
that the greatest things, and the only things truly valuable, are love
and beauty and truth. I think you have learnt what I meant to teach
you, and now you will have to begin to put it to the test. I shall
trust you to do nothing unworthy. I shall not ask you questions or spy
upon you. But, whatever you do, remember there is nobody in the world
more ready to hear your troubles or to help you than your mother. That
is what mothers are for, even if they suffer in the process. I know you
will not make me suffer willingly: but I would rather suffer anything
than feel that you were ashamed to turn to me for help and sympathy
in any difficulty.” Such confidence breeds strength, the strength in
which every good English home should abound. And it must come from that
centre of the home—the mother.
* * * * *
The relation of mother and son is essentially different from that
of mother and daughter; or rather, the son and the daughter stand
in different relations to the home. Also the needs of the two sexes
during their growth are different. The natural independence of a girl
at the school age is smaller than that of the boy, so that, taking
all these things into consideration, there is not the same acuteness
about the question of her leaving home during her education. The far
greater concentration and the far smaller degree of freedom in most
girls’ schools, when compared with the public schools for boys, which
are complete little worlds in themselves, limit the advantages which
they give to compensate for any loss of home influence. Further, women
are not, like men, naturally gregarious, and those who are not suited
for living in a herd profit little from being placed in it. Certainly
there are difficulties of adjustment to be overcome if girls remain
entirely at home, but the adjustment is easier than it is for boys, who
are so expansive in their energies and want such a deal of room for
their exuberant vitalities. Besides, it is at the “awkward age” that a
girl, however great a complication she may then become in the life of
her parents, is most dependent on the help and support of her mother.
Even the most brazen flapper, so I have been told, endures agonies
at her first entry into society as one of its fully fledged members.
In fine, a girl’s education may very well take place at home, and I
support this theory by the fact that, whereas a home-bred boy is always
distinguishable from one who has had the advantages of a public school,
it is almost impossible to tell whether a girl has been to a boarding
school or not, except where she exhibits an exaggerated hoydenism which
is one of the less favourable marks of girls’ boarding schools.
The real crux for mothers and daughters comes after this age is past,
unless a girl is very early married. It is then that she feels the
keen craving for independence and chafes against the restraint of home
life. Her degree of satisfaction at her lot when she reaches this stage
is one test of the judiciousness of her parents in her whole early
upbringing and of their perception how far they can go towards meeting
her natural craving for freedom and responsibility. The first question
is whether Mary and Emily are going to have a definite occupation or
not. Too often before the war it was certain that they were not, but
were going to idle away their days reading novels, playing tennis and
munching chocolates in cinemas until some admirer plucked them from
their peaceful flowerbed. Even when they wanted to do something real
and satisfying, their wish was looked on as something foolish and
hysterical, not to be tolerated for an instant in a well-conducted
family. Certainly Mary and Emily had no excuse for leaving home if
they had nothing to leave it for, but to keep young Englishwomen idle
perforce so as to curb their independence is a dangerous and a cruel
game. Also it leads to an infinity of bickering in the family. The war
has, luckily, knocked some sense into people’s heads on the subject
of occupations for women. Mary and Emily have tasted the pleasure of
regular work and the joy of leisure earned by toil. They are not going
to forget it, and the new direction given to their energies is going to
serve for the girls of generations to come after them.
But the fact of a regular occupation does not settle all the vexed
questions of daughters in the home. They will always be vexed, and
individuals will always have to find their own solutions. Mary’s mother
cannot understand why Mary is so discontented in her comfortable home:
Emily seems contented enough, but Mary is always chafing and tossing
her head and sulking in corners, talking with envy of her friends who
live unwholesomely in poky little rooms and threatening to join them
if she only gets the chance. “What more can the child want?” cries
the mother. “She lives far better here than she could ever do on her
own. She can go out when she likes and she can bring her friends here
where they are always welcome. She gets properly looked after when she
is ill, and when things go wrong she is glad enough of my sympathy
and comfort.” Well, for one thing, Mary, who is of a more independent
temperament than Emily, has not had the opportunity of finding out that
living on one’s own is not all that fancy paints it. She is possessed
by the idea, and she will only learn how much she misses her home when
she has suffered from some of the facts which its realisation entails.
It might be almost worth while to let her try for a time: if she comes
back with relief, well and good. If she finds independence preferable
with all its drawbacks, the wisdom of having ceased to put constraint
upon her will be obvious. Mary, no doubt, is often flighty and does not
know what she really wants, but Mary’s mother has possibly taken no
trouble to study Mary or to find out where the root of her grievances
lie.
She does not probably realise how irksome it is to some temperaments
to live perpetually in another person’s house, however great their
love for that person. A home is controlled by one will alone, it is
impossible to make it a republic. If the will is that of Mary’s mother,
Mary will often find it tiresome to submit to it: if, by any chance,
it comes to be Mary’s will, it is a bad look out for her mother and
father. The mere want of privacy in itself is irritating, unless
Mary has a den of her own and time of her own which are inviolable.
Some parents think that they have an unlimited claim on the time and
convenience of their children, forgetting that filial duty, fine and
natural a motive as it is, is only one among many motives for human
action, and that these motives are in the habit of conflicting. Mary’s
mother may be under the apprehension that Mary has complete liberty at
home: but Mary knows better. How often is she hindered from sitting
down to a solid morning’s work by the knowledge that if she does not
do the flowers nobody will. How often when she is just tucking up on a
Sunday afternoon for a good read is she not disturbed by the certainty
with which the atmosphere is charged that her father will be grieved
if he has no companion for his walk? She could, of course, refuse to
go, but she would then have to accept all the onus of seeming to be
ungracious, and have that absolutely exasperating feeling of having
to be apologetic for not doing something of the doing of which there
should have been no legitimate expectation, tacit or otherwise. Duty is
mostly a repression of one’s own desires, and therefore salutary: but
there is a limit to its value, and in some people there is an intense
desire to get away from it sometimes, if only for a little. Many a
girl who loves her parents and looks with affection on her home, must
frequently think with a sigh that even in the squalidest rooms, there
would be no flowers to do and nobody to expect one to go on Sunday
walks, no feeling that there is somebody to judge one’s friends when
they come and to listen to what one says to them, no rigid times for
meals, no callers to be entertained when mother is lying down, however
absorbed one is in one’s own work, no Emily to play the piano after
dinner, in fact no convenience but one’s own to consult at all.
Men feel this longing for privacy and independence, why should it seem
strange and regrettable in girls? As a whole, they are less capable
of looking after themselves than their brothers, perhaps, but that
is partly due to their weaker social position. Also Mary’s case is
by no means that of every girl, a fact which unfairly tells against
Mary, who does not care a snap of her fingers for Emily’s docility
and want of enterprise. Individuals have got to work out their own
salvation, a task which is always made far more difficult for Mary than
for her brother. Of course, there are infinite degrees of stress and
accommodation in this relation of Mary and her mother: circumstances,
character, common sense, temper, nerves, compatibility, all play their
parts in different admixtures. Where Mary and her mother are both
sensible, or arrive at sense by suffering, the final accommodation is
generally satisfactory. Where sense is wanting, or passion clouds it,
there will always be trouble: and, however much Mary’s mother may have
to put up with from Mary, of which Mary may be only vaguely conscious,
yet she is in the main to blame for not agreeing to one obvious
solution of letting Mary do what she wants. She may be as certain as
the snow is white that Mary is really happier under her roof, and that
only her own tactful care prevents Mary from making some disastrous
mistakes through her own inexperience or defects of character; she may
even be more right than wrong in this belief: yet the fact remains
that Mary is grown up and is the only person who can, in the long run,
be responsible for her life. Is it right to thwart without convincing
her, when it is possible to let her obtain conviction by experience?
Only on the most antiquated theory of parental authority and filial
subordination, a theory which rests upon no observed facts but rather
upon a persistent blindness to the truth.
There is no such thing as natural affection: affection has to be won,
and, once it is won, to be kept by effort or to be lost again. It
is always assumed that parents and children naturally adopt to one
another the attitude of beatific charity, as if they could not be the
severest critics and the most bitter haters one of another, when the
affectionate habits of childhood have frozen into mere formalities
through incompatibilities of temper. In England, where the names of
mother and father are treated with every outward respect, there is far
less real sentiment for them as ideas than in Latin countries. What
makes the relation so close and so warm in England is the comradeship
of the English and the glow of the English home, which welds a strong
bond so early that an overwhelming amount of tension is required for
its complete disruption. But the seeds of strife are sown inevitably
in the adolescence of every family: the weeds to which they grow are
hardy, too, if they are not nipped in the bud. The English mother has
got to do the nipping, but with sympathy not with severity, for the
tool of severity will turn against her, and she will suffer a thousand
fold the pain she has inflicted thoughtlessly on her children.
The truth is that all parents and children must go through a period
of storm and stress, and most of the stress falls on the mothers.
All young things are more or less ungrateful, and this is perfectly
natural: they are following their strongest impulse in pushing their
way out to full growth as ruthlessly as shoots of the rose tree.
They have no time to be reflective till this irresistible impulse
has weakened, so that they cannot realise before full maturity all
that they have forced out of their parents in the way of self-denial,
self-restraint, nervous irritation and even physical labour. For
tangible pleasures and comforts they are grateful enough, but the
intangible prevention of pain, the care and watching, the influence
and the teaching do not become visible to them until they are almost
on the far horizon of past youth. In the sharp momentary irritations
of growth children cannot take these things into account, and for them
a sense of injustice blots out gratitude like a sudden black fog. When
they look back, and suffer from the rough contact of younger life
themselves, then they see the vexed questions of their youth in truer
proportions: they may not find that the wrong was always on their side,
but at least they will sympathise with the pardonable weakness to which
it was due, and will weigh it in the balance with benefits felt but
not seen. Those families are happy who see these exasperations pass
away like a short-lived storm, leaving no devastated tract behind them,
but bringing calm and mellow weather in their wake. The English mind,
averse from brooding, ever ready for compromise and comradeship, is
a temperate climate, rejoicing in these halcyon anti-cyclones after
the chilly gust and the grumbling thunder. When the English family
barometer is at “set fair,” the atmosphere is delightful, and there is
no more charming or sympathetic friendship possible than that between
an English mother and her children, when each looks kindly upon the
other with the eye of perfect understanding, in mutual pride and love
and tolerance. No distance breaks the bond nor does the lapse of time
weaken it, and the mother, seeing the runners to whom she has handed on
the torch settling into a steady stride, can enjoy contented the sunset
of motherhood and matrimony, with the prospect of assuming a benevolent
grandmotherhood that will enable her to spoil her children’s children
without paying the consequences.