CHILDREN H9

with her anyhow; the furious father finds it
out and cuts him off; * mother ' then intervenes:
discovers that the bad girl is an angel, that
she supports her aged parents and pays for her
brother's education out of the earnings as a
prostitute: this brings dad round and the curtain
drops with mother and son weeping in one
another's arms. All * mother's * doing. The
show is really pornographic, the scenes between
the bad girl and the darling boy being quite
disgusting; but the sob-stuff about mother
satisfies our Puritan instincts and makes us feel
good.

" Believe me, it is all skin-deep. We mothers
are rapidly losing all influence over our children,
and I don't know how we can recover it. We
have little or no control over them, whether
boys or girls. The schools and the colleges
take them out of our hands. They give them
everything for nothing, and that is what the
children expect when they come home. Their
standards and ideals are formed in the school
atmosphere, and more by their companions than
their teachers. They become more and more
intractable to home influence and there is nothing
for it but to let them go their own way."

I have heard the same story repeated in many
places—" Talked to Mrs. ------ about uncon-
trollable children " is a sentence often recurring
in my diary—I find it under entries at Pittsburg,
Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, San Antonio3