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