Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence--and at the
same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim
gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una's shoulder;
she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked
for work.

One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of
unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen
the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to
a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby
security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At
forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and
pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite
reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by
her insistence that she is an "old maid," she makes the thought of her
barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and "wants
to keep in touch with her daughter's interests," only, her daughter has
no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly
insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to
stay alone, had she acquired "interests," she might have meant something
in the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the
daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is
usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be unspeakably
horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance,
chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the
mother has her games of cards with daughter, and deems herself
unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only to
hasten back to mother), and even "wonders why daughter doesn't take an
interest in girls her own age." That ugly couple on the porch of the
apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house--the mother a mute, dwarfish
punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart,
a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the
well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in
an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They
are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most
touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs
all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to
endure the