Let us
look at it, for a moment, from another. How weary she must be!
This is her third "function" to-night; the paint is running off her
poor face. She has been snubbed a dozen times by her social
superiors, openly insulted by a Duchess; yet she bears it with a
patient smile. It is a pitiful ambition, hers: it is that her
child shall marry money, shall have carriages and many servants,
live in Park Lane, wear diamonds, see her name in the Society
Papers. At whatever cost to herself, her daughter shall, if
possible, enjoy these things. She could so much more comfortably go
to bed, and leave the child to marry some well-to-do commercial
traveller. Justice, Reader, even for such. Her sordid scheming is
but the deformed child of Motherhood.
Motherhood! it is the gamut of God's orchestra, savageness and
cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at the other.
The sparrow-hawk fights the hen: he seeking food for his brood, she
defending hers with her life. The spider sucks the fly to feed its
myriad young; the cat tortures the mouse to give its still throbbing
carcase to her kittens, and man wrongs man for children's sake.
Perhaps when the riot of the world reaches us whole, not broken, we
shall learn it is a harmony, each jangling discord fallen into its
place around the central theme, Motherhood.
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