The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

MY LADY OF THE BREECHES damnably wasted; in most of these, mothers are all author- made angels—sweet, loving, kind, forbearing, forgiving creatures, who feel the responsibility they undertook when they called upon a part of the spiritual world to come down among us. Of course, such mothers are the ideal mothers of a perfect human race, and the authors may consider themselves justified. Nevertheless, let us be true in this one history, and acknowledge the fact that some mothers are a thoroughly bad lot. They are mostly to be found among the well-to-do people, I suppose—and I do not wonder. When I seea mother smiling upon her grown-up son, I feel very sad. I remember my own parent... There! I called this a history—with a vengeance. You have it. Now for a lesson in psychology. Lionel’s mother was queen and “regente” of bad parents. She was clever, but void of reasoning powers; inclined to religious mania, her immediate neighbourhood was crowded with foul larve. In a legal and womanly manner she had despatched her first husband to the night of a Sanatorium and thence to an early grave. She had suffered badly at the hands of her second. This we may take as being the coarsest form of that automatic justice, which is dealt only to the coarsest natures. It had not, however, extirpated an iota of her fund of self-esteem and lust for authority. To the latter, Lionel had often fallen a victim. He was born bright and happy; the Houses had done well by him. His mother gradually turned him into a self-concentrated, self-conscious, frightened and deceitful youth. She had mentally emasculated him; and, in his fits of understanding, he cursed her with no mean-spirited lips. He never forgave her the death of his 29