ause this power is freely recognised by the men who seek her in
marriage that her vanity seldom has full scope until after she is
married.

[Sidenote: The Destroyer]

After marriage, a great many women begin the slow process of alienating
a man from his family, blind to the fact that by lessening his love for
others, they add nothing to their own store. The filial and fraternal
love is not to be given to anyone but mother and sisters--they have no
place in a man's heart that another woman could fill. The destroyer
simply obliterates that part of his life and offers nothing in its
place.

The achievement sometimes takes years, but it is none the less sure.
Later, it may be extended to father and brothers, but they are always
the last to be considered.

It is most difficult of all to break the tie which binds a man to his
mother. The one who bore him is not faultless, for motherhood brings new
gifts of feeling, sometimes sacrificing judgment and clear vision to
selfish unselfishness. It is only in fiction and poetry that such love
is valued now, for the divine blindness which does not question, which
asks only the right to give, has lost beauty in our age of reason and
restraint.

He had thought that face the most beautiful in all the world--until he
fell in love. Now he sees his mother as she is; a wrinkled old woman,
perverse, unreasonable, and inclined to meddle with his domestic
affairs. The hands that soothed his childish fretting are no longer
lovely. Inattention to small details of dress, which he never noticed
before, are painfully evident. The eyes that have watched him all his
life with loving anxiety, shining with pride at his success and
softening with tenderest pity at his mistakes, are subtly different now.
He wonders at his blindness. It is strange, indeed, that he has not
realised all this before.

[Sidenote: The Awakening]

To most men the awakening comes too late if it comes at all. Only when
the faded eyes are closed and the worn hands folded forever; when
"mother" is beyond the reach of praise or blame, her married boy
realises what has been done. With that first shock comes bitterest
repentance--and he never forgives his wife. Many a woman who complains
of "coldness" and "lost love" might trace it back to the day her
husband's mother died, and to the sudden flash of insight, the
adjustment of relation, which comes with death.

The comic papers have made the mother-in-law a thing to be dread