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 A 
 GIFT BOOK 
 
 FOR 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 HARRISON 
 RHODES 
 
Bonk I ^es 
 
 Copight})?. 
 
 CQEffiJGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
A 
 
 GIFT BOOK 
 FOR MY MOTHER 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 BY 
 
 HARRISON RHODES 
 
 New York and London 
 Harper & Brothers 
 
 ^fc M X X II 
 

 A GIFT BOOK FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 Copyright, IQ22, ly Harper l^ Brothers 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 ©CI,A683242 
 
 H-W 
 
 SEP 16 '22 
 
A 
 
 GIFT BOOK 
 
 FOR MY MOTHER 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 THEY were building yesterday a 
 preposterous small rustic bridge 
 over what is little more than a drain- 
 age ditch, though the gardener has 
 planted it with the wild purple iris 
 and set a Devoniensis rose to clamber- 
 ing over the lattice that runs along 
 one side, so that it is very pretty. 
 The bridge is about four feet long and 
 is really a quite absurd engineering 
 operation, since even in the most 
 tropical of Floridian rainstorms it 
 spans a torrent only about four inches 
 deep. We had, however, talked of it 
 for days, and when the actual con- 
 struction work began there were three 
 men engaged in it — the gardener; a 
 carpenter of the village, highly skilled 
 in "rustic work,'* as the art is called; 
 and the black chauffeur. It was a 
 moment in which my mother would 
 have excelled, directing her cohorts 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 with masterly generalship as she sat 
 upon the patch of lawn near by in 
 a small wicker-seated rocking chair 
 which was set up, like the throne of 
 Xerxes, wherever she marshaled her 
 horticultural forces for weeding or 
 planting seeds, or for such great mo- 
 ments as this of bridge building; 
 indeed, the spanning of the Hellespont 
 would be no more important in 
 Asia Minor than is the conquering of 
 this shallow ditch in our garden. 
 But, alas! for the third spring now 
 the garden is without a general. This 
 is why it gave me an odd turn yester- 
 day w^hen, coming along between the 
 orange trees to observe the great 
 event, I discovered that the small 
 wicker-seated rocking chair, the gen- 
 eral's seat, had been placed upon the 
 patch of lawn near by, though she is 
 no longer here to sit there. 
 
 Neither the gardener nor I said 
 anything to each other about the 
 ** rocker." We understood, and there 
 are certain things one does not talk 
 about, especially if there are others 
 by. I think he believes, in some way 
 of his own, in her actual presence 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 there. I believe less surely, and at 
 any rate much more mystically and 
 symbolically. But for both of us, 
 and for my sister, too, the small green 
 back yard is a haunted place. We 
 all know about the rocking chair. 
 When it rains, whatever may happen 
 to the other garden furniture, this 
 must be brought to shelter. Every 
 night it, at least, must sleep in the 
 woodshed. If it is ever forgotten 
 we apologize to each other, though 
 we do it in a businesslike way as if 
 we mustn't be too sentimental about 
 things. 
 
 Yet the garden is forever haunted 
 with memories, with such a cloud of 
 them that I want to set some of them 
 down in a haphazard, unpretentious 
 chronicle which will have, perhaps, 
 no importance to anyone except me 
 (and of course my sister). Yet there 
 may be some others who will like 
 to hear of just simple happinesses 
 and affections. It is, because 1 write 
 it, a book for sons. It is, also be- 
 cause I write it, a book for her and 
 perhaps for all mothers. 
 
 If indeed it should turn out to be a 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 book at all — which I can scarcely say 
 as I start to write. Nor can I prom- 
 ise that it will be much or mainly 
 about gardens. It must be about the 
 seabeach, too, when I now actually 
 first put pen to paper. It is a blue- 
 and-silver morning, with the sun 
 slowly dissipating the light mist that 
 hangs over the tide-drenched sands, 
 by the side of which, on the dunes, 
 stands my small workshop cottage. 
 There is a bicycle on which I came, 
 blue, too, by the way, and nickel if 
 not silver. A sack as well, with 
 papers and pens and ink. So per- 
 haps there will be a book. The 
 southeast wind is blowing from the 
 Gulf Stream and the Antilles, and as 
 often in the past, under the spell of 
 this Floridian spring magic and in 
 such soft airs, the world from which I 
 have come, first on the railway train 
 and then on the blue bicycle, seems to 
 shimmer like a mere mirage. But 
 memories are more real than this real 
 world. Even the southeast wind 
 cannot blow them away. 
 
 Indeed, this loveliest of winds 
 must always now and again remind 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 me of her about whom and for whom 
 I am to try to make this book. I 
 remember just a day or two before 
 she died in New York, when a rough 
 bhzzardish stdrm was raging outside, 
 and in the room where I sat by her 
 bedside she was finding it hard to 
 breathe, she said to me that she felt 
 if she could only be in Florida with 
 the southeast wind a-blowing it 
 would be so easy. We used to laugh 
 at French people who exclaimed, 
 ^'Enfin, on respire,'^ usually when, 
 driven by approaching suffocation, 
 they had lowered a railway carriage 
 window a full quarter inch. But that 
 day we did not laugh. Here am I 
 breathing, and she is not. Yet now 
 she is — ^just because of this small 
 speech of hers — she will be for me 
 forever in the southeast wind. And 
 for a while, as I think of her, all my 
 life which was not concerned with 
 her, and is not now, when she has 
 gone, concerned with her, seems to 
 shimmer like a mere mirage. 
 
 Since she spent every spring for so 
 many years in our insignificant gar- 
 den and was its general, gardens are 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 a good and pretty entrance to the 
 uneventful country of her life and 
 ours where I am to play guide. 
 
 We were, as children, brought up 
 in an atmosphere of gardens. But 
 perhaps if I am to be honest and ac- 
 curate I should say back yards. 
 Northern Ohio nearly half a century 
 ago did not talk much of gardens, 
 unless it meant vegetable patches. 
 There was no gardener employed 
 regularly to embellish our back yard, 
 no cohorts for mother to direct. 
 There was John Eck, who came, if 
 we could induce him to live up to 
 his contract, once a week to mow the 
 lawn, front and back. My father 
 was of an incredible incompetence in 
 such matters, and his son had in- 
 herited this quality. Yet because 
 my mother had given me at my birth 
 a small share of her passionate love 
 of flowers I attempted, most ineptly, 
 indeed (and my sister, in due time, 
 as she stopped being a baby), to add 
 some horticultural charms to the 
 long, narrow yard with its nub- 
 by and infertile soil. My mother, 
 though she was younger then, was 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 never physically strong. We were 
 her cohorts of that day, but, with us 
 only, she could accomplish nothing 
 like that later Floridian beauty. 
 
 A bed of ground in a sheltered 
 corner facing south between the 
 kitchen and the dining room was In 
 earliest childhood my domain; as 
 my sister grew up to a small spade 
 and rake and trowel, I ceded a part 
 to her, the less favorably exposed 
 and less desirable portion, be it said 
 at once, as befitted one younger and 
 a female. The only permanent 
 equipment of my garden was a patch 
 of day lilies and a border of pink 
 clove pinks which had been trans- 
 ported in my tenderest childhood — 
 and theirs — from my grandmother's 
 garden in the country. My gar- 
 dening lacked both dash and indus- 
 triousness. It was done in a way so 
 unimaginative and cowardly as to be 
 In itself a confession of failure. I 
 saved my pocket money as spring 
 approached, and begged for a special 
 florlcultural grant from the parental 
 authorities, and then purchased, with 
 a lavishness which varied with the 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 sum so accumulated, potted plants 
 at the greenhouse, and set them out 
 in my plot. I had no nonsense with 
 seeds and cold frames and trans- 
 planting; I just turned the plants out 
 of their pots, finding the balls of 
 earth with their roots in a matted 
 mass a very agreeable sight, and, lo! 
 my garden was. I was indeed a rank 
 amateur. 
 
 John Eck himself had a green- 
 house, of lower prices than the one 
 kept by a crabbed and frightening 
 old fellow named Fehn, who, how- 
 ever, purveyed more varied and 
 rarer plants. I do not defend my 
 gardening methods; they would be 
 frowned on by all modern educational 
 authorities. But I will say that the 
 spring spending at the greenhouses, 
 artfully dividing my money between 
 Eck and Fehn, trying to get the best 
 plants and yet hold the favor of each 
 of them, was a very thrilling time. 
 It might have been foundation train- 
 ing had I ultimately embraced either 
 a commercial or a diplomatic career. 
 
 As time went on our ambitions flew 
 higher. Mother had secured a cata- 
 
 8 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 logue ot a nursery near Philadelphia, 
 and we attempted rose culture with 
 named new varieties — I must insist 
 that this was not a commonplace 
 thing, as it is now; it was, for 
 northern Ohio, novel, almost adven- 
 turous. The roses were miserable 
 little bushes and never throve very 
 well. But I came to know La France 
 and General Jacqueminot,which I pro- 
 nounced in four syllables — Ja-quim-i- 
 no, and somehow the horizon broad- 
 ened and glimpses of a woxld outside 
 the Western Reserve were to be ob- 
 tained. The mere easy use of French 
 words, even as I guessed at their 
 pronunciation, gave a sense of per- 
 sonal distinction, of a being, if not a 
 man, at least a gardener of the world. 
 There was in the catalogue a 
 freakish and mysterious *' green rose" 
 given as a prize when one bought 
 twenty others. I insisted upon this. 
 Its arrival was a feverish moment. 
 It was not a rose in the proper sense 
 at all; its flower was a mass of stiffish 
 green leaves that were not of the tex- 
 ture of petals.- It was (after all these 
 years one may be honest) singularly 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 ugly, its only virtue being an odd, 
 spicy odor which it exhaled. But we 
 proudly made much of it and showed 
 it to visitors as a rare exotic which 
 we occasionally imposed upon the 
 softer-natured as an object of ad- 
 miration. There is philosophy to be 
 distilled here, I feel, but I prefer to 
 go straight on to the more disillu- 
 sioned and cynical view of life which 
 came to me with the quince tree. 
 
 There was a so-called ''Japanese 
 quince" with dark, brilliant-red flow- 
 ers set thickly along a brown branch, 
 but I do not mean that. My father, 
 as suited a grown-up man, had a 
 broader vision of the back yard. 
 He saw it as an orchard, and in an 
 expansive moment he ordered little 
 fruit trees which he left to mother to 
 have planted out. There were cherry, 
 apple, peach, and one quince, and we 
 made two rows of them. They all 
 did very badly except the quince, 
 which was a most intrepid tree, 
 flowered prodigiously every spring, 
 and almost broke in the autumn 
 under the weight of its hard yellow 
 fruit. But the thing which gave one 
 
 10 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 the gravest doubts of the wisdom 
 of Providence and of its kindliness 
 was that we all longed for cherries, 
 peaches, and apples, while none of us 
 could ^' abide" quinces. Yet quinces 
 were what fortune showered on us. 
 The questions here raised have never 
 been answered to my satisfaction to 
 this day. I got a hint, however, of 
 the great doctrine of compensations 
 when a cousin named Mary Bentley 
 came to live for a time with us, and 
 we children discovered that it was 
 quince seeds put to soak in water in 
 a saucer which produced the muci- 
 laginous balm which enabled Cousin 
 Mary to paste her hair down in mar- 
 velous parallel "waves," as they 
 were called, and to adorn her smooth 
 white temples with the flat, almost 
 imperishable, locks of hair, like hooks, 
 which were so agreeably termed 
 "beau-catchers" then. Certainly 
 there was a beau caught and ulti- 
 mately married, and I had a momen- 
 tary vision of the possible place of 
 the quince in the scheme of creation. 
 But so much wisdom was almost 
 oppressive to a child so young. 
 
 II 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 Part of the masculine "wider 
 vision'* for the back yard was its 
 availabihty for producing food sup- 
 phes. At my father's request offers 
 to buy fresh vegetables were made 
 me by the kitchen, and every year in 
 a remoter and even more infertile 
 part of the yard I constructed a few 
 beds. I usually heaped them so 
 high that they looked painfully like 
 graves, which indeed they were — ^of 
 hopes. For by some strange fatality 
 radish culture seemed my only suc- 
 cess, and that root or tuber or what- 
 ever it may be, produced such a 
 general indigestion in the family 
 that the whole question of the 
 advisability of vegetable raising 
 remained unsolved. In this matter 
 my mother remained serenely non- 
 committal, but somehow one felt 
 that her doctrine was being driven 
 home, that the service of pure beauty 
 as represented by flowers was even 
 more valuable than that of utility, 
 which radishes stood for. Perhaps 
 there is no need to linger in that 
 back-yard garden, although I long 
 at least to celebrate the admirable 
 
 12 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 stove and oven combined which I 
 used to build of brick, and in which 
 the boys of the neighborhood roasted 
 potatoes and occasionally the succu- 
 lent and saucy English sparrow laid 
 low by a sling shot. (I was glad to 
 recognize this bird years later in an 
 expensive French restaurant in Chi- 
 cago as a mauvlette.) 
 
 My father was a better walker 
 than my mother, and so more de- 
 voted to country rambles, in which I 
 participated, quite like a grown man, 
 so I fondly imagined. And on these 
 excursions I knit some of the strong- 
 est ties which now bind me to the 
 generation which preceded me, to 
 that notable period of American his- 
 tory which precedes and includes the 
 Civil War; indeed, to the very 
 sources of that Americanism which 
 so many of us long to recapture now. 
 
 This book — I seem to be assuming 
 that it will turn out to be a book — 
 will be, it is probably already evi- 
 dent enough, very personal. Yet I 
 would like to feel that in the por- 
 traits of those whom I knew and 
 loved best in that generation which 
 
 13 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 preceded us (who are now middle- 
 aged ourselves) I had in some sense 
 made a picture of their great time in 
 America. If we can and will remem- 
 ber our immediate predecessors we 
 shall drink at the clearest fountains 
 of national pride. Great days were 
 theirs of simplicity and frugality, of 
 eager life and unquestioning patriot- 
 ism. Great days of war and of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln. Are not we, who are 
 their sons and daughters, most highly 
 privileged because we inherit di- 
 rectly their traditions, have heard of 
 them at our parents' knees? Were 
 there not grandparents, too, and at 
 their beck did not mistier figures 
 from a still earlier America step forth 
 and become real for us.^* 
 
 I would like to ask my brothers 
 who were children in the 'seventies 
 to remember that to us were handed 
 torches lit at great fires in America. 
 If dark days shall come to our coun- 
 try we must at least lend some of the 
 light in which our fathers lived, 
 strove, were happy, and then died. 
 
 Nothing in the history of one's 
 country is too trivial to be worth 
 
 14 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 setting down somewnere. Particu- 
 larly in America, where civilization — ■ 
 at least so called — is forever slowly- 
 spreading over the whole land, are 
 all k'nds of minor dates in danger of 
 being lost. When did olives arrive in 
 northern Ohio and when did we stop 
 dressing lettuce and tomatoes with 
 sugar and vinegar? Have we all 
 stopped? Such matters, if I could 
 remember them accurately enough, I 
 would brazenly set down, believing 
 them of some importance some day 
 to some one. 
 
 A history of the progress of domes- 
 tic decoration and taste should be 
 written by some one. And bad taste 
 is as significant — and perhaps as 
 important historically — 'as good. My 
 mother, as her mother before her, 
 and as in fact most American women 
 (not always their husbands), stood 
 eagerly waiting for the novelties in 
 art as they slid down the western 
 slope of the Alleghanies. We never 
 had a gilded milking stool in the par- 
 lor, but we did possess a Chianti 
 bottle painted with iridescent colors 
 and :adorned with a blue bow. 
 
 IS 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 I can remember, through seeing 
 my mother engaged in the enter- 
 prises, first of all "air castles'' con- 
 structed of perforated cardboard and 
 beads; then a strange rough hempen 
 lace called, I seem to remember, 
 macrame, though I doubt whether 
 there is such a word in French. 
 Then rickrack, wasn't it a braid? 
 And repousse brass — there was a 
 panel of iris framed in red plush 
 which for a considerable period 
 adorned the parlor. And in an inter- 
 lude what I seem to have called 
 "scratchella" painting done on vel- 
 vet with a skewer. And in due time 
 ** Kensington" embroidery and cat- 
 tails in a Japanese jar, the far wash 
 of aesthetic London. Every Ameri- 
 can family has such an art history, 
 certainly in the Middle West. It is 
 comic, but I like it. I think it gay 
 and gallant, too. And through it 
 all, American women, my mother 
 among them, were making their way 
 to a true love of beauty in which, 
 give them time, they will be excelled 
 by no women in the world. 
 
 This will be a book about a 
 
 i6 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 thousand things, though chiefly my 
 mother. And in writing of her I 
 have another wish, of which I must 
 speak humbly. My father went 
 when I was seventeen. My mother 
 Hved on till I was approaching 
 what had been my father's age. I 
 have never married, and in the years 
 that went by my relationship to my 
 mother stands, among many happy 
 relationships, as the best. It is not 
 always so in families, that I know. 
 And last summer, under a pine tree 
 by the edge of the blue waters of 
 Long Island Sound, a tried and dear 
 friend of mine asked me if there were 
 any secret of the relation between 
 mother and child which I could share 
 with her. Her mother and she had 
 not always understood each other, 
 and she wondered, and her eyes 
 grew wet, whether her own children 
 would grow up always to love and 
 to understand her. If by chance I 
 have any secrets I would like to tell 
 them. 
 
 It would be arrogance to say of 
 any friendship or relationship of 
 one's own that It was perfect. And I 
 
 17 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 know that even for what share of 
 perfection came to me I have no 
 concrete, easily discovered secret. 
 
 I can perhaps, however, suggest a 
 partial formulation of what family 
 affection should afford one. The 
 world is a gay, diversified place of 
 contending interests. Happiness is 
 to come home to some one (or to 
 more than one) for whom you al- 
 ways wish well, who it is incon- 
 ceivable could ever wish for you 
 anything but success and happiness. 
 Here is something steadfast in the 
 shifting phantasmagoria of the 
 world, Gibraltar firmly set among 
 the treacherous currents of life's 
 tides. 
 
 There could never have been in 
 my mother's mind any conflict be- 
 tween her children's happiness and 
 her own; they were to her one and 
 the same thing. It was not that she 
 in the least sacrificed hers to us or 
 we ours to her. Happiness was 
 merely the unconscious adjustment of 
 our varying interests; the balance 
 had already been struck before she 
 herself had ventured to formulate her 
 
 i8 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 own demand for happiness. I speak 
 of her only; I would not claim this 
 for us. Is this perhaps part at least 
 of the secret of being a mother for 
 which my friend asked me? 
 
 19 
 
II 
 
 IT is always pleasant to me to 
 think of my mother and it feeds 
 my pride to believe that many of her 
 qualities were typical of the America 
 in which she mostly lived and of the 
 American women of that day. Her 
 great sense of personal elegance in 
 her clothes endears a whole century 
 to me. Anyone who cares to browse 
 in the innumerable books of impres- 
 sions of and travel in America 
 written during that so little remem- 
 bered first half of the nineteenth 
 century will find that however horrid 
 and crude our visitors found the 
 country, and particularly its male 
 inhabitants, they had to admit that 
 the ladies were beautifully dressed. 
 Unsuitably, perhaps, the critics some- 
 times maintained. They could not 
 understand how in the vulgar pub- 
 licity of the hotel ladies* parlor fe- 
 males of refinement should choose to 
 appear nightly in the latest and love- 
 
 20 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 liest toilettes from Paris. But why, 
 w# may well ask, should the American 
 ladies of that day or any other wait 
 for the country to grow up to their 
 frocks ? I think it one of the finest of 
 our national traditions, and I boast 
 that when my mother went away to 
 school she had the prettiest dresses 
 of any girl there. 
 
 This was not because she was rich, 
 though her father had probably an 
 income of quite twenty-five hundred 
 a year. He bought and shipped the 
 cheese produced in the region around 
 the little northern Ohio village where 
 he lived. (He would probably be 
 called a "cheese king" now, wouldn't 
 he.?) There had never been, there 
 never was even to the end, any tre- 
 mendous amount of money for my 
 mother's clothes. She regretted this, 
 for she would have liked always to 
 be perfectly w^ell dressed. If I can 
 make it comprehensible, there was 
 here, I think, very little personal 
 ambition or desire for superiority. 
 She merely thought every woman 
 should always be perfectly well 
 dressed, and thought it distinctly a 
 
 21 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 woman's fault If she were not, or 
 her husband's or father's if her 
 failure were at all the result of lack 
 of funds. Isn't that America? Isn't 
 it precisely what we all really think, 
 bless us? 
 
 Nothing, indeed, could have been 
 more firmly founded in my mother's 
 mind than the duty of every woman 
 to look her best. And when anything 
 is a duty one has at once respect for it. 
 To us as children it was interesting, a 
 historical subject worth study, what 
 mother had worn as a child. I re- 
 member what a piquant paradox it 
 seemed that she had never been per- 
 mitted to have a high-necked dress 
 until she was grown up. There are 
 some extremely pleasant pictures of 
 the little Adelaide with the childish 
 gown demurely low over the shoul- 
 ders. It is amazing of how remote a 
 world such photographs already seem. 
 Would a portrait of an Elizabethan 
 child or of a small Roman of Caesar's 
 day seem really any more old- 
 fashioned ? 
 
 Less than a half century will pro- 
 duce the same effect of immemorial 
 
 22 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 antiquity. As I write there comes 
 into my mind a picture of my mother 
 taken when I was a child — and this, 
 I must protest, is not quite im- 
 memorial antiquity. She is in a mar- 
 velous dress of black silk (I hope it 
 would "stand alone") with a neat, 
 tight-fitting bodice and a great, 
 beautifully bouffant skirt of great 
 puffs and cascades and Heaven knows 
 what. Her hair is a marvel of puffs, 
 too, and curls and ringlets, and she 
 stands in a pose of incomparable 
 elegance by a proudly isolated *' ped- 
 estal" crowned by what would seem 
 a gas jet in a lovely globe. This is 
 perhaps forty years ago, yet if I 
 didn't know her and you asked me 
 to believe that she was, say, the 
 Empress of the Brazils in the eight- 
 eenth century, I should. 
 
 If the ladies of our nation are ele- 
 gant, are they not as traditionally 
 good as they are beautiful? Is that 
 not our special national blend .? There 
 is a glass box with a curved glass top 
 within which lies a lovely nosegay of 
 cloth flowers, which was used to con- 
 tain the childish treasures of the little 
 
 23 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 Adelaide. There was chiefest of all 
 a tiny glass mandarin duck in an 
 attached black-glass boatlike sup- 
 port which enabled it to float ma- 
 jestically upon, say, a goldfish bowl. 
 This was extravagantly admired by 
 the little Adelaide's children; it 
 still is. What should perhaps have 
 been more admired were the school 
 prizes, rewards of merit, ordinarily 
 inscribed merely **To Addie, for 
 being a good girl." These were 
 usually just small cards, shiny and 
 of an obvious elegance of quality, 
 on which were painted little knots 
 and garlands of bright flowers, the 
 inscription written very small with a 
 pen which traced a line of hairlike 
 fineness. The writing of the day 
 seems to indicate a ladylikeness 
 which has quite vanished in modern 
 life. Indeed, my mother's hand- 
 writing expanded with the times, 
 though it was never metamorphosed 
 into the great scrawl of England 
 which came so much into vogue with 
 her sex in the late 'eighties. 
 
 If my mother was good — ^and in- 
 deed I believe she was — she appeared 
 
 24 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 to be quite unconscious of it. It 
 was merely what a woman naturally 
 would be — ^it was like being well 
 dressed. I do not remember that she 
 ever exactly taught or tried to teach 
 her children to be good; she seemed 
 merely to assume that of course they 
 would be. There was a fear which 
 haunted all American ladies of that 
 day, that an accident should cause 
 them to be conveyed to a hospital 
 and it would be found that their 
 underwear was torn or ever so 
 slightly soiled. I imagine that any 
 of life's accidents which might have 
 disclosed an ever so slightly sullied 
 morality would have seemed in the 
 same class. It was a thing to be 
 guarded against by the simple ex- 
 pedient of being clean and good. 
 
 Immorality, in all its varieties, 
 there undoubtedly is in the world — 
 my mother would have gone quite 
 that far in admitting the existence of 
 evil. As she grew up — or perhaps 
 rather as her son did, she came into 
 contact at times with a varied world, 
 that of the theater for example and 
 the arts generally. It may safely be 
 
 25 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 assumed that the people she met 
 sometimes had not quite the stand- 
 ards of the northern Ohio where she 
 won the school prizes for being a 
 good girl. She was very friendly 
 with them, very undeceived by them, 
 very understanding, very forgiving. 
 That was the way they were, and 
 perhaps they could not help it; and 
 they had other excellent qualities 
 and charm and gayety and many 
 things which go to make life agree- 
 able. She was indeed glad to see 
 them when they wanted to see her. 
 But her relationship to them all 
 seemed also comic to her. If a fa- 
 mous lovely actress now living with 
 her fourth husband rushed up and 
 kissed her under the arc lights of 
 Broadway as the theater crowd strug- 
 gled for carriages, she was pleased 
 enough, but she was apt to remark, 
 as we drove away, that it was pos- 
 sibly an unusual thing to happen to 
 a daughter of Solon. (This was the 
 northern Ohio village where the 
 "cheese king's" father had settled 
 when he went west from Connecti- 
 cut.) It was pleasant to see all these 
 
 26 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 people, but of course it was not neces- 
 sary to emphasize the fact that your 
 own standards remained quite un- 
 changed. Is this not just the way 
 American women have gone through 
 the life of different worlds and con- 
 tinents, more especially Europe, quite 
 understanding and often sympathiz- 
 ing, but, to the despair and be- 
 wilderment of foreigners, keeping 
 their original standards quite intact? 
 Marriage, whatever strange and 
 comic things other people and these 
 newer generations might make of it, 
 was for her a decorous and happy 
 relationship. I never heard my 
 father and mother quarrel. It was 
 to be assumed that it had been a 
 love match, though this would not 
 perhaps be just the thing one would 
 tell young children about. Is this 
 not America, too? We saw father 
 and mother often enough with other 
 men and women in the simple neigh- 
 borhood society of those days, in 
 Cleveland, at card parties and in- 
 formal "droppings in" of an evening, 
 and at occasional dances. But I 
 never saw an instant's flirtatiousness 
 
 27 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 on the part of either of my parents; 
 no later-acquired knowledge of the 
 world leads me to believe there was 
 any such; it was not then dans les 
 moeurs in northern Ohio. 
 
 To a childish mind it seemed so 
 certain that the affection of our 
 parents could have no ending that it 
 seemed as if it could have had no 
 beginning. In the sense, at least, 
 that the most startling discovery of 
 my early childhood was that my 
 father had been married before. I 
 learned this by accident, I forget 
 how, and that he had loved his first 
 wife, who was, it appeared, a sweet 
 young creature who had died early 
 in their married life. It is odd, per- 
 haps, that I never spoke to him of 
 all this. It was not that I approved 
 or disapproved; it was merely that 
 my new knowledge made my father 
 a mysterious, almost romantic, figure. 
 It gave me a feeling that grown-ups 
 had indeed lived as children cer- 
 tainly had not. 
 
 It inspired me in the end with the 
 courage to ask my mother who was 
 the original of a colored portrait 
 
 28 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 which hung modestly in the upstairs 
 hallway. And she told me at once, 
 with great simplicity, that it was the 
 man she had been engaged to and 
 that he had been killed during the 
 war. Indeed, that was almost all she 
 ever told me to the end of her life, 
 though of course I gradually came to 
 learn a little more. 
 
 I realized that his sisters were 
 called my aunts and his nephews and 
 nieces my cousins. And to-day they 
 all feel that it is only by the sad 
 chance of war that this is not our 
 relationship — though they all loved 
 my *' truly" father. There was an 
 enchanting Aunt Mary whose visits 
 pleasantly punctuated all my child- 
 hood. She had been a great beauty, 
 and I imagine a great flirt, when she 
 was younger. But a disappointment 
 had come and she had never married, 
 and she was growing old in a kind of 
 gay, lovely tenderness w^hich seems to 
 me, as I look back, to have so often 
 been the way with what we called 
 '*old maids" in those days. She 
 was responsible for the rose culture 
 because it was she who discovered 
 
 29 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 the address of the nurseries near 
 Philadelphia. And she did the love- 
 liest embroidery which I came later 
 to realize was like the detailed sward 
 of flowers spread before the Virgin 
 in a primitive Italian picture. She 
 was deeply religious, yet her most 
 engaging trait was a genuine wit 
 which most quaintly manifested it- 
 self in unbelievably apt and funny 
 quotations from the Bible which she 
 made at the most seemingly inapro- 
 pos moments of life. I wish I could 
 remember them — but then I wish I 
 could remember the Bible. 
 
 Once there came to visit us a 
 mysterious lady from Cincinnati with 
 her daughter. They seemed to be 
 old friends of my mother's, though 
 she had not seen them since the 
 daughter was a little girl. Then I 
 learned from them that when Augus- 
 tus W — — • had been wounded and 
 was brought from the hospital to 
 
 Mrs. O 's house in the old part 
 
 of Cincinnati to grow well, my 
 mother came down from the north- 
 ern part of the state to be with him 
 till he recovered. He died, instead. 
 
 30 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 and I think perhaps he was always 
 the romance of my mother's Hfe. I 
 learned only the other day for what 
 a long time she wore mourning for 
 Augustus W — — : And after she 
 died my sister showed me a silk scarf 
 faded to magenta, part of a uniform, 
 which had always been among my 
 mother's treasures. We sent it to 
 his family, but was it, after all, 
 more theirs than ours? There are 
 more than blood kinships. 
 
 My father knew more of all this 
 than I do. I have some letters of his, 
 urging marriage, in which he so com- 
 pletely understood. I still know 
 very little. There is a packet of 
 Augustus's letters, tied, as all such 
 packets should be, with narrow blue 
 ribbon. We have never read them. 
 I think perhaps we never shall, 
 though they will be treasured quite 
 as of old. This was the only thing 
 in her life of which my mother never 
 talked to her children, though we 
 can guess that, except for the final 
 sorrow, it was all happiness. Both 
 our parents seemed to have judged 
 it wise to present to us merely a 
 
 31 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 peaceful domestic picture, with no 
 sorrows of youth which had pre- 
 ceded final happiness. 
 
 I Hked Augustus W 's colored 
 
 portrait in the upper hallway. I 
 came to have a feeling half filial for 
 him. He looked dashing, and I was 
 proud that he had died in the war, 
 though equally glad that my father 
 had not. He was, he is even now, 
 one of my ties to that war. I 
 think of him even now sometimes 
 when people talk of the useless- 
 ness of wars and the unworthy 
 motives which drive nations into 
 them. I still believe the war was 
 fought, as far as northern Ohio 
 went, from a generous and gallant 
 wish to free a race which was held, 
 unjustly, so northern Ohioans be- 
 lieved, in slavery. 
 
 As to what war does to individual 
 lives, did it not give us a different 
 father? This was the perplexing 
 problem that I sometimes busied my 
 child's mind with. It had endless 
 possibilities of speculative thought. 
 I only feel now that I should like to 
 derive, if I could, from all the brave 
 
 32 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 Americans of that generation just 
 before me. 
 
 The O — ■ — s, mother and daughter, 
 since they had hved, were a more 
 comprehensible, if sHghtly less he- 
 roic, tie with the war. Mrs. O — — • 
 had grown fat, and she was an im- 
 passioned letter writer. Even then 
 my mother struck a most modern 
 note and was ahead of the times in 
 the matter of not answering letters — 
 to-day the almost universal rule. 
 Her correspondent in Cincinnati came 
 invariably to commence her commu- 
 nications with the sonorous and dra- 
 matic phrase, "I cannot understand 
 your long silence," which became a 
 family catchword and was quoted in 
 chorus by my sister and me for years 
 afterward. 
 
 If this sounds as if we "made fun" 
 of mother, then this is the place to 
 admit that it is so. We did, as we 
 grew up, in quite the nicest and most 
 affectionate way. I am proud rather 
 than otherwise of it. I think the 
 filial and parental attitudes are, as it 
 were, interchangeable, and that as 
 one grows up one begins to be nat- 
 
 33 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 urally a little the parent of one's 
 parent. If I may put it that way, 
 my mother became, as she grew up 
 — or down — a charming child to her 
 children. We invented, when we 
 were still in our teens, preposterous 
 pet names for her which even here 
 seem too foolish and too intimate to 
 be set down. We were ravished to 
 be able a little to protect her, prob- 
 ably even more ravished at rare in- 
 tervals to be able to make her obey 
 us as — at rare intervals — we had 
 sometimes obeyed her. As children 
 grow older should not parents grow 
 younger ? Should they not fairly soon 
 become the same age and go on to 
 the end, however that end may come, 
 as companions, playmates? Is there 
 not here perhaps some hint of that 
 secret that was asked of me under the 
 pine tree by the blue waters of the 
 Sound .? 
 
 I hope I seem to no one to speak 
 of senile decay, for my mother, at 
 least, never grew, except in certain 
 bodily infirmities, old. It was not 
 that she wanted to *' dress young" or 
 to *' behave young." There was 
 
 34 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 never, so far as I could see, any 
 abatement of a firm, though quite 
 uninsistent, dignity which naturally 
 increased with her years. But she 
 was young and gay and interested 
 in those who were young and gay, 
 and interested till the very end. 
 
 This tendency of mind has a dis- 
 advantage; indeed I am quite willing 
 to call it a fault. After my mother 
 reached forty she began to find that 
 her contemporaries were growing to 
 be dull dogs; later she found them 
 coming to be unpleasantly and un- 
 reasonably old. She was bored with 
 them. She found younger people 
 fresher and more interesting. She 
 behaved a little as if it were the fault 
 of old people that they should grow 
 old. Perhaps it is, when you come to 
 think of it. Relatives who persisted 
 in growing old she found particularly 
 annoying; she felt almost respon- 
 sible for them, though she knew it 
 was really not her fault, but theirs. 
 Yet since to say that anyone was old 
 was indeed the final insult, she rarely 
 used the word. No, she would say. 
 So-and-so was not an old lady; she 
 
 35 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 was only seventy. When she herself 
 was seventy she thought possibly 
 there might be old people of eighty. 
 When she was seventy-five the aged 
 had come to be those of eighty-five. 
 She herself did not look young; her 
 hair grew a soft and lovely white 
 and her face wrinkled with wisdom 
 and long years. But there was al- 
 ways a patch on her cheeks of the 
 same color which had stained those 
 of the good little Adelaide at school. 
 And within, her heart was blithe, as 
 hearts are not always, be it said, 
 even when the breasts that inclose 
 them are young. 
 
 Perhaps part of the secret of being 
 a mother is to keep oneself young; 
 perhaps the secret of being a good 
 child is to aid in this lovely conser- 
 vation. The Chinese more than any 
 other race have thought and felt 
 deeply on these questions of filial 
 piety. There is a whole literature, 
 so they tell me, of instances of how 
 good sons behave. Of the few stories 
 from the Chinese I know there is 
 one of a middle-aged man whose 
 father and mother had grown to be 
 
 36 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 so very old that their minds had 
 crumbled within them until their 
 only feeling was one of sorrow at 
 their great age. And to relieve this 
 the son, bent and middle-aged though 
 he already was, procured for himself 
 toys and, though he did so awk- 
 wardly, romped and played before 
 his parents like a very young child, 
 so that they might have the sweet 
 delusion that they were young and 
 in the first happy years of their mar- 
 riage. The people of the village 
 mocked and scoffed at him, yet he 
 persisted, and his parents, very old, 
 died still young. As a rule of con- 
 duct this would set an exaggerated 
 and ridiculous standard. Yet there 
 is something poignant about the 
 story's ingenuous simplicity. There 
 seems to lurk in it some profound 
 philosophy of how the family tie 
 should bind us closely together to 
 fight off the threat of that unknown 
 beyond old age toward which our 
 paths lead. 
 
 The adaptability of American wom- 
 en is, it has long been recognized, 
 one of their most amazing character- 
 
 37 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 istics. As is undoubtedly already 
 evident, this is to be no record of a 
 brilliantly diversified triumphant ca- 
 reer; indeed, it is the peaceful record 
 of one who lived content with ob- 
 scurity. Yet if we remember the 
 quiet northern Ohio village where 
 were my mother's origins, it will be 
 easy to see that in many circum- 
 stances of her uneventful life she was, 
 to employ the chaffing and affection- 
 ate phrase we always used, "the 
 first daughter of Solon'* to have 
 ventured so far into the great world. 
 As she stood beneath the dome of 
 St. Peter's at Rome, or motored up 
 Riverside Drive in New York to 
 dine at Claremont, or was admitted 
 to visit a harem in Algiers, we chil- 
 dren always boasted shamelessly that 
 she was indeed that *' first daughter" 
 to whom this adventure had come. 
 She always agreed to this, wholly 
 without pride, because it was so, 
 although she was sometimes assailed 
 by doubts as to whether a certain 
 Frances (commonly called Frankie) 
 
 M , w^ho had married in Chicago 
 
 and, it was thought, might have 
 
 38 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 traveled, had not, perhaps, sometimes 
 had this great distinction of being 
 the first daughter of Solon to buy, 
 shall we say, a Paris hat in the Rue 
 de la Paix. 
 
 Are family jokes always silly? I 
 suppose they are. There was an- 
 other extremely elaborate one, a 
 sort o^ pendant to the first-daughter- 
 of-Solon joke, which I despair of 
 making seem comprehensible, least 
 of all funny, to anyone. There was 
 all these years a dearly loved cousin 
 of my mother's, named Alice, who 
 was living in the sleepy, already de- 
 caying, village, and seemed, indeed, 
 the last daughter of Solon ever 
 likely to leave it and go forth. It 
 was on this fact that the soi-disant 
 joke was founded. If, for example, 
 we drove up the long ridges that lead 
 to Monte Oliveto, south of Siena, we 
 would remark that it was the most 
 probable thing in the world that we 
 should find Alice had already been 
 there a month and was a great con- 
 noisseur of the famous frescoes. 
 There was a variant of this in which, 
 for example, we protested to mother 
 
 39 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 that she was wrong, that it was 
 really not at all likely that if we went 
 to sup at the Savoy in London we 
 should find that Alice always had the 
 table in the corner to the right of the 
 entrance. All this was satirical, but 
 if it had an object beyond permitting 
 us to be nonsensical, it was with 
 affectionate satire to point out to 
 mother how delicious it was to be 
 from Solon and now to be where she 
 was. 
 
 Isn't this all profoundly American? 
 Doesn't Europe still make us all feel 
 more or less that we are from Solon, 
 and does it not add to the pleasure 
 of imderstanding and appreciating 
 and loving Europe to be so derived ? 
 How many years Henry James affec- 
 tionately and delightfully studied 
 the impacts of Solon upon an older 
 world. Nowhere else than in his 
 earlier books is there a record of so 
 many instances of our inexplicable 
 readiness for Europe. How prepos- 
 terous and incredible it is, for ex- 
 ample, that when my mother came to 
 London and Paris people discovered 
 that she looked like Madame Rejane! 
 
 40 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 • 
 
 No stranger, perhaps, than it was for 
 me to hear as a child my mother tell, 
 after returning from a trip to Cali- 
 fornia with my father, how, when 
 they had gone to San Diego, he had 
 protested that he realized for the 
 first time that he had married a 
 Spaniard. Who but an American 
 could ever come of purest New Eng- 
 land parentage and yet look like a 
 Spanish Rejane? (I remember on 
 my first trip abroad — I was thirteen 
 and had gone with my father, not 
 my mother — ^I cried with homesick- 
 ness at Edinburgh because a dark- 
 haired, slender, white-faced lodging- 
 house mistress looked, so 1 thought, 
 like my mother.) Does the American 
 air, while it makes foreigners into 
 Americans, also make Americans into 
 foreigners ? 
 
 My mother never went abroad till 
 she was over fifty. She had been re- 
 strained by an excessive fear of *' that 
 old ocean" and by the impractica- 
 bility of leaving us children behind. 
 She would not go with father, but 
 when, after his death, we, being now 
 a little grown up, I, indeed, having 
 
 41 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 finished college, announced that we 
 were going abroad, she came at last 
 without a question. My maternal 
 grandfather had gone abroad for the 
 first time with me when I was seven- 
 teen and he over seventy. Perhaps 
 I come of a late-flowering stock. 
 After that first trip, though she never 
 lost her fear of that venerable and 
 yet abhorrent Atlantic, she made the 
 crossing many times. 
 
 42 
 
Ill 
 
 FOR an American lady of even 
 over fifty, as my mother was, 
 Europe is almost sure to be a forcing 
 house. In her case it brought out 
 suddenly all sorts of lovely tastes 
 and appreciations. It is my belief 
 that there are many Americans who 
 have, as it were, dormant within 
 them a sense of beauty, sometimes 
 nipped by native chill airs and arid 
 environment, yet springing to sudden 
 life and growth under French or Eng- 
 lish or Italian skies. It is this quick 
 power of developing innate tastes 
 which has brought about the aston- 
 ishing transformation of our towns 
 and cities during the last decade or 
 two, the swiftness of which change 
 must be wholly incomprehensible to 
 any European — to anyone, in fact, 
 who cannot understand about Solon 
 and what it means to be its first 
 daughter to see the fair, strange 
 lands and lovely treasure houses 
 across the sea. 
 
 43 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 My mother's development was as 
 fresh and delightful — ^as our own, 
 shall I say? Except that I think it 
 was more so, for I judge her taste as 
 intrinsically surer and finer than ours. 
 Of course, at her age, she did not, for 
 example, plunge into the study of the 
 history of the arts, nor did she wrestle 
 with the languages with quite our 
 shouts of glee. She was already, I 
 can guess, a little tired. And here — • 
 it was her graceful and distinguished 
 manner of acknowledging her age — 
 she said that she had children to 
 learn foreign tongues and to struggle 
 with the technic of traveling; she 
 resigned that to them. She never 
 attempted to speak any of the 
 languages beyond that achievement 
 of every American woman of asking 
 for hot water wherever she may be. 
 She gradually came to understand 
 some French and more Italian. As 
 for English, as pronounced in thf? 
 rural districts or in Scotland, she 
 always maintained that it was for her 
 just slightly more difficult than the 
 continental tongues. 
 
 It was not merely as regards the 
 
 44 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 arts that her native adaptability 
 showed. We were not — so many 
 American families are not! — 'destined 
 to shine in the courts of Europe. 
 But all the everyday life of these 
 strange peoples, as far as it lay open 
 to our observation, we could study. 
 To all this my mother brought an 
 extraordinarily sympathetic and hu- 
 morous eye. She never abated any- 
 thing of her personal dignity, yet I 
 can remerhber her observing with de- 
 light a Venetian street festival in a 
 remote quarter where gondoliers were 
 dancing in the streets, or noting any 
 of the thousand delightful minutiae of 
 Italian life. I remember, the last 
 time she was in Venice, the month's 
 protracted and philosophic study 
 which she made, while she sat eating 
 ices or drinking tea in the Piazza, 
 of the methods of the lace merchants 
 under the colonnades — *' lace hawks," 
 she technically termed them, from 
 the way they swooped forth from 
 their shops and seized any passer-by 
 who had, to their keen eye, the look 
 of a buyer. The chapter of such 
 minor adaptabilities and compre- 
 
 45 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 henslons would of course prove end- 
 less. I could not choose instances, 
 nor, indeed, tell why I remember 
 them. I recall, for example, a spring 
 in Geneva, when my sister was un- 
 romantically laid low with chicken- 
 pox, and my mother and I used to go 
 every Sunday afternoon to some vil- 
 lage festivity in the adjacent country, 
 to see peasants dance and to drink 
 a picholet of vin rouge, the pichoiet. 
 being a local measure that now looks 
 in memory ridiculously small and 
 insufficient. Through it all she was 
 in some incredibly delightful way the 
 child of northern Ohio. We went 
 once to North Africa, and I think the 
 thing that most delighted and amazed 
 her there was when in southern Tuni- 
 sia, near the holy city of Kairouan, 
 she saw the Arab farmers plowing 
 with camels. She had, as the good 
 little Adelaide, seen Ohio farmers at 
 the plow; now she saw in Africa a 
 custom the quaintness of which she 
 was completely competent to ap- 
 praise. She saw something in that 
 camel silhouetted against the African 
 sky which we of the later city-born 
 
 46 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 generation missed. It was an earlier 
 America than ours smiling compre- 
 hendingly at the holy city, and I 
 felt, though I shall probably not con- 
 vey my feeling to anyone else, an 
 epic note — as if my country in this 
 little incident ranged itself beside 
 all the older civilizations of the 
 world's history, and the great East 
 linked hands with little Solon. 
 
 Travel is a great developer of 
 leadership; what little I have I per- 
 haps owe to playing courier. My 
 mother's leadership was intermittent; 
 it was exercised only in emergencies. 
 May I hint that here perhaps I come 
 close to another of the secrets of how 
 families may grow old — ^or young — 
 happily together.? I remember once 
 in Venice, intoxicated by the reading 
 of the red Baedeker, I had projected 
 a trip to all kinds of little cities along 
 the Adriatic's shore and then across 
 the hills to Umbria. It was all 
 feasible enough — in the guidebook. 
 The practical difficulty was that I 
 spoke almost no Italian, and all the 
 wiseacres of the Venetian hotel par- 
 lors warned us that in these little- 
 
 47 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 visited regions we should find no one 
 who spoke either English or French. 
 I hesitated, though I protested that 
 my hesitation was due to my anxiety 
 for the comfort of the ladies of my 
 family. My mother may have sus- 
 pected that in my heart I distrusted 
 my own abilities, felt that I lacked 
 dash, courage. At any rate, she said 
 smilingly that she thought we should 
 go. She was, after all, she asserted, 
 the one about whose comfort I was, 
 she assumed, chiefly concerned, and 
 if she could risk it why could not the 
 rest of us.f* 
 
 We risked it. Never has an ex- 
 perience been more salutary for me; 
 even now I sometimes bolster up my 
 courage with the thought of it. We 
 had an enchanting trip, and — this is 
 the miracle — I arrived at Rome a 
 month later, speaking something — I 
 fondly thought it was Italian — with 
 a fluency and speed which I have at- 
 tained in no other language except 
 my own; the speed is scarcely equaled 
 even in that. I decided to take les- 
 sons immediately— a few might be 
 needed, I was humble enough to 
 
 48 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 admit, to give the final polish. Alas! 
 when my professore started to make 
 me grammatical and Italian the 
 fluency went, the pace slowed down, 
 so that by the time I struck the sub- 
 junctive and the passato remoio of 
 verbs I crawled like a snail. But I 
 had gained something of courage, 
 self-reliance, independence, in those 
 crumbling cities. I should like to 
 pay my respects to the hotel pro- 
 prietoi; of Pesaro, whose son I was to 
 know later as a fashionable head 
 waiter in New York. And to the 
 parish priest — if he is still alive — 'of 
 Senigallia who patiently endured a 
 conversation in Italian for two hours 
 with me while the express train, run- 
 ning quite ten miles an hour, de- 
 scended from Urbino to the plain of 
 Foligno. 
 
 I remember another time when 
 my mother suddenly took the reins 
 of the family into her hands. We 
 had been spending the winter in a 
 Paris pension^ modestly enough, God 
 knows. I had just been graduated 
 from college, and an aunt of my 
 father's had promised to pay my ex- 
 
 49 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 penses for a year abroad. Now she 
 wrote that her own affairs had gone 
 badly and that she must withdraw 
 her offer. A family panic ensued. 
 My father had been dead only a 
 couple of years; we had not at all 
 grown used to managing our own 
 affairs. We were in even ordinary 
 cases rather distressed and tremu- 
 lous about them. We were at least 
 determined not to go home till the 
 year was over, but we did not see 
 how we could afford to stay. My 
 sister and I inclined to a passionate 
 economy. We countermanded an 
 order for a new and smart hat for 
 mother, and informed her, with real 
 brutality, I doubt not, that she must 
 continue to wear a shabby old bon- 
 net — -I think she never quite forgave 
 us that. Then we packed her on a 
 night train and, like war refugees, 
 we fled to Geneva, where, so the ru- 
 mor of those days had it, there were 
 obscure pensions in which, out of 
 season, one might live for almost 
 nothing. 
 
 The pensions did exist; to set 
 down their prices now would only 
 
 SO 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 throw me Into a frenzy of regret for 
 the cheap living of yesteryear. We 
 estabhshed ourselves, and then the 
 second blow fell, with the news that 
 a wretched country bank in Missis- 
 sippi in the stock of which was part 
 of the tiny fortune my father had 
 left us, had failed. This seemed the 
 end, black despair. I remember after 
 a scene of gloom I caught up my hat 
 and flung out of the house for a soli- 
 tary stroll by the lake's edge, to be 
 recalled by my little sister, sent 
 after me. They had actually been 
 afraid, so I extracted from her, that 
 I was going to make way with my- 
 self. This suspicion, so foolish and 
 ill judged, I asserted, threw me into 
 a frenzy of angry rage and I came 
 back to the obscure pension with 
 wild words and reproaches on my 
 lips. It was indeed the moment for 
 some one to assume the leadership of 
 our disorganized little family group. 
 I had left my mother as plunged 
 in gloom as any of us. I came back 
 after a scant half hour to find her 
 calm and smiling. She had a plan, 
 she said. We were all, she feared, 
 
 SI 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 inclined to be blue and depressed, 
 and Geneva out of season was at 
 best a dull place. She thought if 
 we started for Italy the next week 
 and had a nice trip there we should 
 all feel better. I gazed at her in 
 amazement. The Italian trip was, of 
 course, what we all wanted, but even 
 before the arrival of the second, or 
 Mississippi, blow we had judged it so 
 expensive as to be quite out of the 
 question. Yes, she realized that, she 
 admitted, but then, she went on, 
 we hadn't then needed it so much. 
 Besides, she went on in conclusion, 
 and she laughed lightly, it "would 
 all be the same in a hundred years." 
 She was right, it probably will be. 
 It was the phrase which, almost 
 traditionally, indicated her most reck- 
 less moments. It was gallant and it 
 w as, I think, characteristically Amer- 
 ican. We set our national standard 
 of living where it seems decent it 
 should be, and then somehow we 
 find the funds. There is a kind of 
 miserly and squalid economy, a sort 
 of cowardly cutting of the coat ac- 
 cording to the cloth, which comports 
 
 52 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 ill with that bright national optimism 
 of ours which says that the best is 
 not too good for an American. Our 
 family best on that Italian trip was 
 not too extravagant. (We lost the 
 friends we started with, the second 
 night out, at Pisa, because we would 
 go to the cheapest hotel on the 
 guidebook's list.) But it pulled us 
 out of gloom which would have 
 wasted for us almost half of our 
 precious European year. And some- 
 how the financial crisis adjusted it- 
 self, as crises often will if you make 
 it plain that you will stand no non- 
 sense from them. 
 
 I have a perpetual delight in the 
 memories of our European adven- 
 tures. It was fortunate for us, as in 
 my wisdom of to-day I look back, 
 that there was not always — almost 
 never, in fact — money enough to 
 allow us to go to the most expensive 
 and fashionable hotels. That spring's 
 economy in Geneva, though it came 
 to so agreeable a tragi-comical end, 
 was like a chapter in a story book 
 as I remember it. For in such cheap- 
 ish continental retreats still lurked 
 
 S3 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 the English left over from the era of 
 Dickens and Thackeray — ^almost one 
 would say from the time of Miss 
 Austen, decayed gentlewomen still 
 feeding upon the Peerage and bravely 
 having afternoon tea though the 
 skies might fall. There was, too, a 
 private hotel — ^boarding house, to be 
 accurate — ^where I actually heard the 
 "Battle of Prague'' played by a 
 maiden lady who at the age of fifty- 
 five was making her first trip away 
 from her remote Yorkshire village. 
 In such strange scenes my mother's 
 dignified amiability made her quite 
 at ease. And it seemed to her as 
 remarkable to be the first daughter 
 of Solon to visit them as it would 
 have been to have been the first to 
 stand on the summit of Mont Blanc 
 — which of course she never did. 
 
 54 
 
IV 
 
 I SHOULD like to return this once 
 to the native elegance of Ameri- 
 can women, and the inelegance of 
 American men. My father repre- 
 sented another school of national 
 thought, that of the instinctive dis- 
 trust of '* style." In my maternal 
 grandfather as well I saw the flower- 
 ing of this deeply American tendency. 
 One of my grandfather's favorite 
 stories — it seemed to him brilliantly 
 satirical — was about a man who in a 
 fatal moment allowed his wife to 
 buy a new Brussels carpet for the 
 parlor, with the result that gradu- 
 ally everything in the house had to 
 be replaced in a style that "went 
 with" the fashionable Brussels, until 
 in the end the wretched protagonist 
 of the ominous yarn had dissipated 
 his fortune and ruined his life. The 
 anecdote, though it was always ex- 
 cessively agreeable to induce grand- 
 father to tell it, had never exerted 
 
 55 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 much influence over the ladies of his 
 family. You may be sure that at 
 the earliest opportunity my grand- 
 mother had secured a floor covering 
 purporting to come from Belgium's 
 capital. American women were long 
 ago on the march. Even in the little 
 villages of northern Ohio they meant 
 to move with the times. There was 
 a dashing anecdote in our family 
 concerning the first coming of the 
 famous "Black Crook" to Cleveland. 
 The legend was usually, of course, of 
 fathers of families who suddenly 
 found urgent business calling them 
 to town, and there flew to witness 
 the Amazonian marches from the 
 front row. In our family it had been 
 my grandfather who had set his face 
 against such follies, and my grand- 
 mother who had gayly gone to town 
 for the Saturday matinee, just to 
 see how fast the world was moving! 
 My grandfather disapproved vio- 
 lently of the "swallow-tail," and my 
 father did not much like to wear it. 
 He thought it quite suitable for his 
 wife and him to start oflFto an evening 
 party on foot, even in the Ohio snow^ 
 
 56 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 His wife would certainly have liked 
 him to be claw-hammered and con- 
 voying her in a carriage. Not that 
 there were any quarrels over this; 
 during the honeymoon my father 
 had told my mother that if there 
 were to be any quarrels in their mar- 
 ried life she would have to make 
 them. And it had not occurred to 
 her that she could quarrel with her 
 husband. Indeed, as far as I know, 
 neither ever precipitated such an 
 event. Perhaps both of them recog- 
 nized in the other, as we may now, 
 inevitable, though conflicting, forces 
 in American life. I am extremely 
 glad to have been placed to see both 
 from the tenderest age; it helps me 
 constantly to understand my com- 
 patriots. 
 
 Why do American — indeed, any 
 women — dress well.? The question 
 is old and there is no pretension here 
 to having found a new answer to it. 
 I would not say that my mother 
 dressed for either men or women, 
 but merely because it was the nice 
 thing to do, just a natural and 
 pleasant instinct. Of course she was 
 
 S7 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 not like a woman of whom I knew 
 later, who was content to dress 
 superbly in a hotel sitting room, have 
 her dinner in this magnificent soli- 
 tude, and conclude a delightful eve- 
 ning by planning in what gown she 
 would dine alone the following night. 
 Mother would have preferred that 
 her children at least should see her 
 if she were well dressed. But, 
 broadly speaking, she had no other 
 social end in view. 
 
 In fact, quite apart from clothes, 
 I do not think I ever saw her do any- 
 thing with social success as its ob- 
 ject. I will be honest, I do not know 
 that I ever saw her attain much 
 social success, so that we may, per- 
 haps, as the world judges things, be 
 touching on a fault. She was always 
 pleasant to the people who came in 
 contact with her, and among them 
 she picked out with a very sure taste 
 the pleasantest people, and would 
 have liked to see them rather than 
 the others. But she was what the 
 French call very recueillie; she never 
 made that step forward which social 
 success perhaps demands. But there 
 
 58 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 are enough people in America mak- 
 ing steps forward; it can do no harm 
 to remember for a moment one who 
 stood smiHng and unambitious where 
 Hfe had placed her — in circumstances 
 quite fairly pleasant, be it said. 
 
 We were, however, talking about a 
 pretty taste in dress — were we not? 
 — my mother's and the American 
 woman's in general. Dress for dress's 
 sake is not a bad motto. Did they 
 ever aspire to anything beyond 
 perfection .? 
 
 We children used to assert laugh- 
 ingly that our mother had never 
 seen a sleeve which wholly pleased 
 her, and that she never really liked 
 any dress until it was almost worn 
 out, by which time usage had given 
 her a certain affection for what had 
 been inevitably a partial failure, to 
 which a priori all dresses seem fore- 
 doomed. Are women like that? Is 
 there some radiant vision of being 
 perfectly well dressed which always 
 swims before them? 
 
 To dress well and to live becom- 
 ingly — ^this does not mean ostenta- 
 tiously — seemed to my mother in 
 
 59 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 those days part of woman's duty; 
 she never questioned it. In these 
 matters no qualms troubled her — 
 did they trouble anyone then? — 
 as to other women fated to dress 
 less well and live less becomingly. 
 We hear a great deal of talk of such 
 qualms in these days, but do social 
 and radical ideals seem to abate at 
 all our twentieth-century ladies' love 
 of dress.? However, I may as well 
 admit that my mother had little 
 social consciousness, as we under- 
 stand the phrase in these days of the 
 reconstruction of the world. And 
 she was typical of the greater part of 
 the good women of her day — a day 
 that already to us seems centuries 
 ago. It is because so many of our 
 mothers were like this that I venture 
 to speak of mine. 
 
 She was incapable, I take it, of 
 thinking other than kindly of any 
 class in the community in the sense 
 that she wished them to have no 
 suffering and to enjoy a suitable de- 
 gree of comfort. She was, when I 
 was a small child, I can remember, 
 as active as her health permitted in 
 
 60 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 the local Dorcas Society. Dorcas 
 Society indeed! Does that not date 
 the ladies enlisted in it? Does it not 
 almost bring back the eighteenth 
 century with ladies bountiful them- 
 selves carrying baskets of calf's-foot 
 jelly or arrowroot to old Goody 
 Two-Shoes in her humble cottage? 
 My mother never consciously put 
 forth much of a plan for the better- 
 ment of the world, beyond kindness 
 to the deserving poor who came near 
 your gate. 
 
 She represented, as do now all the 
 women of that time, a point of view 
 which to modern people seems to 
 savor of a dark age. And yet mira- 
 cles do not exactly happen over- 
 night in a nation's consciousness. 
 I would urge that something in the 
 social attitude of that day is not so 
 remote from the most characteristi- 
 cally American thought of our day. 
 For example, my mother strongly 
 disapproved of all slums; she de- 
 tested even passing through them. 
 But, oddly enough, as we of the 
 younger generation thought even 
 then, she did not waste time censur- 
 
 6i 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 ing landlords and municipal author- 
 ities; she merely blamed the poor 
 for living in such horrid places. And 
 if we chaffed her about Marie Antoi- 
 nette and cake for the starving in 
 Paris, she replied, with some show of 
 justice, that the poor ought to go to 
 live in the suburbs, where there were 
 cottages and gardens, and that they 
 should be educated to do that. 
 Perhaps you couldn't destroy slums, 
 she thought, but you could destroy 
 the willingness to live in them. 
 Isn't this sound, characteristically 
 American, and really very modern 
 doctrine.? 
 
 She had that very American belief 
 in the advantages of raising the 
 standard of living, and when she 
 came to live a good deal in the 
 South she extended this doctrine — ■ 
 as is not always done — 'to the colored 
 race. She believed that if the negro 
 lived better he would have to work 
 harder — and to her both seemed de- 
 sirable. She was pleased when her 
 children became interested in a school 
 for black girls in our village, and she 
 sent her prettiest slippers, when they 
 
 62 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 grew ever so little rusty, to one of tlie 
 colored teachers, an elderly woman 
 herself, who had a very appealing 
 elegance and quiet, ladylike distinc- 
 tion. If we had suggested to our 
 mother that her lovely slipper buck- 
 les might stir unduly luxurious am- 
 bitions in some young black girl's 
 breast, she would have answered 
 that if the girl really wanted such 
 things she would, when she left 
 school, work harder to get them. 
 And in this point of view I have 
 noted with amusement and pleasure 
 that she was lately joined by Miss 
 Pankhurst in England when the 
 spendthrift tastes of the London 
 workingwoman were under discus- 
 sion. 
 
 It never irked my mother that 
 some of the modern social doctrines 
 eluded her. As I grew older and ob- 
 served the modern tendencies in 
 myself with pride, I wondered a 
 little that, since my mother kept 
 abreast of the times in so many 
 ways and almost seemed to grow 
 younger as she grew older, she did 
 not see, with me, that alleged wider 
 
 63 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 horizon. Now that she is gone 1 am 
 indined to be wholly grateful to the 
 lack of social consciousness which 
 permitted the women of her genera- 
 tion so to concentrate themselves 
 upon their homes and their children. 
 I do not urge it upon the mothers of 
 to-day. I only feel that it is well to 
 find what we can that is lovely and 
 touching in each period of the world's 
 development, and that if it were a 
 fault of my mother's which left her 
 the leisure to be more intimately my 
 friend I will not now complain. 
 
 She would, however, in a way, have 
 been the first to recognize that the 
 restrictions put in her girlhood on 
 women's activities had resulted in 
 serious losses to the world — ^notably 
 in her own case. She could have 
 been — and she knew it — an excellent 
 boss carpenter or mason or builder or 
 contractor. Not that she did any- 
 thing with her own hands — and is 
 this not of the very essence of Ameri- 
 canism? — but that she knew how 
 things should be done. I remember 
 once discovering her directing a 
 bricklayer. 
 
 64 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 "Why, mother," I said, "I didn't 
 know you knew how to lay brick!" 
 
 *'I don't," she answered, with an 
 agreeable crispness which increased 
 in her with years. ''But I observe 
 and I have used my mind." 
 
 She had a passion for alterations 
 and remodeling; it gave her more 
 pleasure to fix over a house than it 
 would have given her to build a new 
 one. She was always wanting to cut 
 a window or ''throw out" a bay or 
 find space for a new bathroom, and 
 our tiny house in Florida was always 
 in metamorphosis. 
 
 Directing labor seemed to her an 
 admirable occupation for women. I 
 remember how proud she was of my 
 sister once when a black boy who 
 had been beating carpets and so 
 forth said: 
 
 "Mis' Rhodes, if Miss Margaret 
 had enough of us colored boys she 
 could jes' clean up the whole world." 
 
 1 am putting off as long as 1 can 
 the confession that in all mechanical 
 arts I was, as my father had been 
 before me, a bitter disappointment 
 to mv mother. How intolerably 
 
 65 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 must competent women like her 
 suffer from men who are not *' handy " 
 about the house! It had always been 
 the prerogative of the male, the 
 proud insignia of his sex, that he 
 could drive a nail straight. Indeed, 
 perhaps it will always be. And here 
 we had failed her. Sometimes it 
 must have seemed to her my worst 
 fault. It was not my worst fault — ■ 
 she must have known that — but it 
 was a fault that almost until my 
 coming of age she could not be silent 
 about. 
 
 My worst fault really was, at 
 least in the childish period to which 
 I seem instinctively to be reverting 
 again, *' being a good boy." It is the 
 most unpleasant confession I have 
 to make; it is perhaps the most 
 degrading anyone can have to make. 
 I say this not only because it is the 
 truth, but because, I admit, I hope 
 thereby to rouse interest in this 
 rambling writing which will other- 
 wise be to the end so lacking in sensa- 
 tional disclosures. I feel that I am 
 not wholly lacking in a certain star- 
 tling courage in admitting how good 
 
 66 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 a little boy I was. My mother can- 
 not have deceived or flattered her- 
 self, she must have known I was, 
 yet she bore with me with the utmost 
 patience. 
 
 The Autobiography of a Good 
 Boy, if It could be written with brutal 
 honesty, might stir readers, though 
 they would think it too depressing 
 and morbid, as it needs would be. 
 I have no intention of setting down 
 in completeness such a narrative 
 here. But I would like to protest in 
 behalf of all unfortunate good little 
 boys that no one need think that 
 good boys enjoy being good! They 
 almost always feel what bad style it 
 is, how offensive to any true world- 
 liness or cultivated taste. They 
 despise good children when they 
 read of them in edifying books, and 
 they think nothing of them when 
 they encounter them in real life. 
 But if a child is naturally honest, 
 for example, or not quarrelsome, no 
 one but those who have been good 
 children can know how tragically 
 hard it is for him to be bad. In vain 
 the child tells himself how cowardly 
 
 (>! 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 it is to be good — even at my pres- 
 ent distance from childhood I have 
 something of this feeHng. The con- 
 scientious good child goads himself 
 on to badness, not knowing, poor 
 wretch, that badness is a gift from 
 God which no struggles on his part 
 can bring within his reach. 
 
 The parent of a good child is most 
 unhappily situated. A mother es- 
 pecially can scarcely venture on 
 urging a child to be bad, even though 
 she secretly knew it ought to be. 
 This will explain, I suppose, why my 
 mother never very strongly urged me 
 to be good and never very bitterly 
 reproached me when I had attained 
 a mild, tame half badness. I re- 
 member how I once desperately 
 engaged with several other boys in 
 my first theft (I might perhaps pre- 
 tend that this was the beginning of a 
 splendid series, but I may as well 
 admit that so far as I know I have 
 only stolen twice). We nabbed two 
 pigeons belonging to some boys with 
 whom we were in feud, inhabiting a 
 contiguous but inferior street. So 
 far so good; indeed, some details of 
 
 68 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 the raid were to the credit of my 
 inventive talent. But almost at 
 once vengeance overtook me. The 
 miserable birds we incarcerated in 
 the loft of a disused barn at the back 
 of our backyard. This accomplished, 
 the whole affair ceased to interest 
 anyone but me. I, their jailer, had 
 to feed the dreadful greedy things, 
 since my too tender heart would not 
 let them suffer. Of course I was soon 
 longing to release them, but, alas! 
 all too cleverly, we had clipped their 
 wings and made flight impossible. I 
 had to purloin food from the house 
 and buy grain with my pocket money; 
 none of the other boys, who knew 
 and despised me as good, would con- 
 tribute a penny. I had constantly 
 to invent pretexts for slinking to the 
 barn. And worst of all, the pigeons 
 seemed to be growing tame and fond 
 of me. This was more than could be 
 borne, and at the end of perhaps a 
 fortnight I sobbed out the whole 
 absurd story to my mother. 
 
 What she really thought I suppose 
 it was out of the question that I 
 should know; to the end of her life 
 
 69 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 my goodness — fortunately a little 
 mitigated with the years — ^was still 
 a subject upon which, in the interests 
 of our friendship, we both preserved 
 a decent reticence. I remember I 
 asked wildly what, oh, what should 
 I do, expecting, perhaps, reproof for 
 my badness. But I know she only 
 smiled a little and said that she should 
 think that I would merely put the 
 pigeons back in the place they came 
 from and say no more about it. She 
 even helped me make a plan whereby 
 I, unaided by my former accom- 
 plices, could convey the birds in 
 secrecy, and so, incognito, make 
 restitution. 
 
 It was years before I had courage 
 to steal again. This time it was 
 from the house at the seashore which 
 we took furnished. There I pur- 
 loined, with the knowledge and I 
 suppose the acquiescence of my 
 mother, a corkscrew, presumably 
 from gay Paris, the handle of which 
 was made by a lovely pair of female 
 legs striped crosswise as if they wore 
 a maillot of bright green and black. 
 I trust it was with satisfaction that 
 
 70 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 my mother observed my now greater 
 aplomb and ease in badness. But 
 even now I have occasional twinges 
 of conscience, and if the lady from 
 whom we took the house, whose legs 
 they are, will write to me I will send 
 them back. 
 
 My mother, it must be evident, 
 made very little fuss about life. It 
 was, I think, an engaging trait. I 
 had, not so long ago, a stiff neck 
 which finally turned into a mild 
 rheumatism and into an aching back 
 which fretted me for some six months. 
 I grew nervous, a little frightened, I 
 suppose, and impatient. And I re- 
 member how I exclaimed to her one 
 day that I hoped I wouldn't have a 
 pain in my back all the rest of my 
 life, and how she at once replied, 
 very cheerfully, indeed: 
 
 "You probably will." 
 
 It made me laugh, made me, too, 
 see backaches in their true relation 
 to the whole scheme of life. Mine 
 suddenly became, what of course it 
 was, a trifle. And when it left m.e it 
 was scarcely noticed. 
 
 71 
 
V 
 
 T PROMISED earlier that this 
 1 should be a book somewhat about 
 gardens. But it can only be about 
 one very small and unpretending 
 garden; there is enough to say about 
 that tiny patch to fill all the space I 
 can venture upon taking. I do not 
 envy people with large gardens; 
 their riches of ground and their in- 
 dividual rose bushes can never mean 
 as much to them as they do to a more 
 modest Candide. It is almost in- 
 credible that there should be so 
 much lore concerning just a village 
 back yard. 
 
 There is a sort of summerhouse at 
 one side, overhung by a myrtle tree, 
 thatched with palmetto leaves, and 
 overrun with honeysuckle. The myr- 
 tle is a lovely tree with drooping, 
 wandering branches, but it is not, on 
 the whole, as romantic as its name. 
 Its real usefulness is that a spray of 
 it in leaf, placed in a room, will drive 
 
 72 
 
FOR MY MOTHER • 
 
 away fleas. So they say. My 
 mother once thought that the owner- 
 ship of such a tree made it possible 
 for her to permit a Boston terrier 
 named Doctor to sleep in her bed- 
 room. But she decided ultimately 
 that the myrtle was loveliest growing 
 in the garden and protecting the 
 summerhouse — if it could, indeed, so 
 protect — from a too abundant insect 
 life. 
 
 The summerhouse is really called 
 the bosquet, because at a small fishing 
 village near Trouville they used to 
 call small green inclosures in the 
 garden that. We wanted to call it 
 after the chief pride of the Hotel des 
 Parisiens, Le Parasol de Robinson — ■ 
 {Crusoe is understood). But we 
 couldn't in decency do this, because 
 our bosquet was not really a parasol, 
 which is inclosed on all sides by green 
 coming down to the very ground, and 
 entered by a small opening on one 
 side, while our bosquet was acces- 
 sible on two whole sides. 
 
 There is a table in it with a pal- 
 metto-trunk support and a top which 
 was once natural wood neatly var- 
 
 73 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 nished. It is now green, painted so 
 in a sudden fine emotional and ar- 
 tistic frenzy by a fellow named 
 Ca^ille, who was a Frenchman and 
 for a while our butler. He was old, 
 rather falsely and badly preserved, 
 yet he moved with great vivacity, 
 and he confided to us that when he 
 had served at the Cafe Martin in 
 New York he was commonly termed 
 by his associates a butterfly, le 
 papillon. He was almost stone-deaf, 
 which I believe a papillon is, and this 
 rather pathetically had relegated 
 him again in his advancing years to 
 the humble position of bus boy. 
 This, I imagine, stung his pride, and 
 he accepted to come to Florida with 
 us. 
 
 He was the least important part of 
 a menage. He had a wife named 
 Jeanne, younger and much hand- 
 somer than he, a high-spirited crea- 
 ture who, five minutes after her 
 arrival, asked my mother where the 
 garlic was kept, and cried, melo- 
 dramatically: 
 
 **My God! a French cuisine with- 
 out garlic!" 
 
 74 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 The poor papillon adored her, but 
 not she him. She made no secret of 
 it. She had in France loved the 
 chef de gare at Nancy, but circum- 
 stances, possibly his high social po- 
 sition as station master, had made it 
 impossible for him to marry her. 
 Jeanne had in anger fled to Paris, 
 and there, almost on the first caprice, 
 married the humbly adoring Camille. 
 We used to picture to ourselves the 
 magnificent chef de gare, gorgeous in 
 a uniform, and be sorry for Monsieur 
 Butterfly. And much later, after 
 they had disappeared into the limbo 
 of servants who will not stay, and the 
 German guns were pounding that gal- 
 lant and distinguished Nancy, we 
 used to wonder if at the gare a hand- 
 some man, now middle-aged, stood 
 bravely at his post. We wondered, 
 too, if he ever thought of the good- 
 looking Jeanne who, but for his pride, 
 would have cooked so well for him. 
 
 The adventures, even the simplest, 
 of French people in America always 
 give me furiously to think. Never 
 did I view our simple Florida village 
 with such a cold, disillusioned eye as 
 
 75 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 under the Influence of Camille. I 
 was going one week-end to Palm 
 Beach, and Camille, as he carried 
 my bag to the rather ramshackle 
 local conveyance which was to take 
 •me to the station, remarked, tem- 
 perately: 
 
 *' Amusez-vous bien, monsieur. On 
 ne s'amtise pas ici." 
 
 I was struck cold, as it were, in a 
 moment. I saw what a desert of 
 dullness to a Frenchman must seem 
 an unsocial American village with 
 nothing of the equipment which the 
 smallest hole by the seaside provides 
 for the Parisian en vacance. 
 
 It was, indeed, on a plea of this 
 same dullness that they left us. 
 
 ''What will you?" asked Camille, 
 with the air of a greater world. "// 
 ny a pas de casino, il ny a pas de 
 musique, en somnie il ny a rienf 
 
 The village has grown to a city. 
 Ily a un casino et de la musique. And 
 one might meditate philosophically 
 on the stride that has been made in 
 America during the last decade in 
 providing small towns with des agre- 
 ments. When people talk of the 
 
 76 
 
FOR MY MOTHLk 
 
 difficulty of inducing anyone to be or 
 to continue to be an agricultural 
 laborer I wonder whether there is 
 not wisdom in the French system of 
 small villages, from which the hands 
 go forth in the morning to the farm 
 a few miles away and return at night, 
 if not to a casino and la musiquey at 
 least to some social companion- 
 ship. Now that the moving picture 
 has become the supreme American 
 amusement, it would be possible to 
 make the smallest village habitable. 
 If the world is to work harder, must 
 it not also play harder? 
 
 In a small garden you become 
 acquainted with all your plants. 
 There is a small, mossy-looking one 
 near the bosquet which is called the 
 ''artillery plant," so the gardener 
 asserts, because at a certain season of 
 the year — always when she wasn't 
 there, my mother remarked — if water 
 is poured on it it sends up puffs like 
 steam. It may be so; we tried to 
 believe it was. It is always much 
 pleasanter to believe everything the 
 gardener tells you. There was an- 
 other tree the leaves of which, 
 
 77 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 *' mashed," were an excellent poultice 
 for any *' risings," which meant boils 
 and so forth. 
 
 In a small-enough garden small 
 events become great; I am sure 
 there is some great secret of happi- 
 ness hidden here. Bridging the ditch 
 or covering an already existent bridge 
 with a pergola upon which a cloth- 
 of-gold rose used to attain the im- 
 portance to my mother which the 
 building of his pyramid may perhaps 
 have had to Cheops. This, at any 
 rate, is the way to enjoy bridging 
 ditches! 
 
 The birds drop a good deal of seed 
 into a Florida garden, besides which 
 are the "self-sown" plants which the 
 gardener, who invests the vegetable 
 kingdom with personality, calls "vol- 
 unteers." I remember how, only a 
 little while back, it seems, a slender 
 sapling, bird sown, I imagine, pushed 
 its way up by a favorite little bridge 
 where we had filled the ditch with 
 wild iris. This stranger was a 
 pleasant-enough little fellow, but he 
 was distinctly an intruder and my 
 first impulse was of extermination. 
 
 78 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 But my mother, the essence of whose 
 everyday wisdom was the avoidance 
 of quick decisions, decided, after a 
 night which brought counsel, on spar- 
 ing him. Hers was a broader garden 
 vision; she saw in the future a big 
 tree giving just the green shade that 
 this part by the woodshed lacked. 
 Now when she has gone what she 
 saw has come true. I sat yesterday 
 by the sapling, now grown to the 
 pride of its full strength. The spring 
 had waked it and the tender green 
 of its young leaves and feathery 
 tracery of its fringelike blossoms 
 were lovely against the cloudless 
 southern blue. And there, in some 
 sense that I cannot quite make clear, 
 there in that vigorous life of the 
 young tree was, for me, my mother. 
 Is not this perhaps immortality, to 
 have caused something to happen 
 which lives on after you.? A slender, 
 intruding sapling that you have 
 saved? A cool shade under which 
 those, perhaps, who know nothing of 
 you may rest and be for a passing 
 moment happier.? In this sense the 
 small garden is, for her children, 
 
 79 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 forever haunted. There is no plant- 
 ing of rose bushes, no simple tracing 
 of a border's edge by violets, no 
 tangle of red rose and trumpet vine 
 which climbs up to what was her win- 
 dow, but tells me, who now must 
 potter about her garden alone, that 
 I am not alone. 
 
 My sister believes a little some- 
 thing in the communications that 
 sometimes seem to come, through 
 those attuned to catch them, from 
 the newer existence. And oddly 
 enough, the thing that would come 
 nearest to convincing me is the ap- 
 parent triviality of the messages my 
 mother is said to send, one especially, 
 for example, urging my sister, who 
 has always nourished a kind of preju- 
 dice against this flower, "to plant 
 petunias.'* They gave color, my 
 mother used to say, and placed in a 
 discreet distance they made a garden 
 
 gay. 
 
 I have now some German petunia 
 seed, the first, I think, that has come 
 out of the enemy land. It is of that 
 marvelous deep-purple flower — -veil- 
 chen-blau, they call it — which we 
 
 80 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 had admired so at Baden-Baden. 
 And if they bloom I shall perhaps 
 believe the war is over. There are 
 such things as mechanical aids to 
 one's feelings. I am trying to bury, 
 if I can, the bitterness of the conflict 
 in deep-purple petunias. My mother 
 lived through the first war years, 
 and the proper attitude toward Ger- 
 man roses was difficult to know. We 
 were almost glad, I think, when 
 Kaiserin Augusta Victoria lan- 
 guished. It was, on the other hand, 
 almost impossible to dislike Frau 
 Karl Drusckki when she flowered 
 white with huge magnolialike bloom. 
 Even now, when war is over, I view 
 with suspicion Freiherr von Mare- 
 schall, who seems to carry on over the 
 vicissitudes of a wet spring better 
 than any English or French or 
 American rose. And I find an omi- 
 nous significance in the very bad 
 condition — of Bon Silene. Unhappy 
 Silenus these days! 
 
 Somehow we came to think and 
 talk of the inhabitants of my mother's 
 garden as if they were alive; but are 
 they not alive.? I have never seen 
 
 8 1 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 anyone who loved flowers quite so 
 much as my mother. If you wanted, 
 really to hurt her feelings, you had 
 only to suggest that she had been 
 brutal or unsympathetic or cruel to 
 one of the children of her garden, 
 some rose or hibiscus or orange tree. 
 If this sounds silly, I do not very 
 much care. At the heart of all deep 
 human aff^ections there is just this 
 kind of fond folly. The things a 
 mother murmurs to the child at her 
 breast are foolish babblings, yet 
 sacred. And lovers' talk is not all 
 wisdom if you were to print it. And 
 I am glad that even when we both 
 grew up my mother's talk and mine 
 would possibly often have seemed to 
 outsiders like that chatter of fools. 
 
 Let us go back to that young sap- 
 ling which was saved. 
 
 The process was part of our family 
 history. As the tree grew up, to our 
 intense delight it turned out that its 
 indigenous name was — ^on account 
 of its fringelike blossoming — "grand- 
 father's beard." This preposterous 
 appellation convinced my mother — • 
 if conviction had been needed — that 
 
 82 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 her intervention had been right. 
 But then about the fourth or fifth 
 year, when the tree had attained a 
 fairish size, it became the object of 
 the impassioned attentions of a kind 
 of woodpecker called sap sucker, 
 who simply would not leave it alone. 
 We drove him away with cries and 
 sticks, and both mother and I de- 
 scended to the childishness of talking 
 to him and arguing the point. But 
 unless some one stood guard all day 
 long he was sure to be found pecking 
 away at the trunk of his chosen 
 friend. We did not begrudge him a 
 sustenance, but we feared he would 
 girdle the tree and kill it. But a 
 certain wise woman, visiting the gar- 
 den, told us that sap suckers, however 
 elaborate a pattern they might etch 
 into bark, never made the complete 
 circle which destroys. And so it 
 proved. For two successive years 
 the sap sucker's love lasted; the proo 
 of his devotion may still be read 
 upon the tree's trunk, but he worked 
 no harm. A mysterious instinct, not 
 common in nature, I should guess, 
 made him want to spare life and per- 
 
 83 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 mit the tree to bear seeds, which 
 should perhaps be carried by birds 
 to other gardens, there in time to 
 yield green shade to human beings 
 and sweet sap to new generations of 
 wandering birds. 
 
 The birds know gardens well — I 
 suppose as we know the pleasure and 
 health resorts of men. I am sure, as 
 they come north with the spring, 
 some of them plan to rest a day or 
 two behind our house There was in 
 the garden next door a great mul- 
 berry tree which one could go under 
 as into a tent and find the green 
 canopy hung thick with purple fruit. 
 At the moment of the berries' great- 
 est lusciousness there was for almost 
 a week a great concourse of birds in 
 the gardens, and they went round the 
 great mulberry bush not only so 
 early in the morning, but all day 
 long, with a deal of chatter and gos- 
 sip. My mother termed it the mul- 
 berry festival; it was a date in her 
 garden calendar like the vernal equi- 
 nox. Everyone should have such a 
 private calendar of the year, marked 
 with the events that are really great, 
 
 84 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 like the coming of new asparagus and 
 oysters, and the children back from 
 school, and one's mother perhaps 
 coming to town to visit her children 
 and to dine about in pleasant restau- 
 rants and go to the play. 
 
 There are always great events in 
 even the smallest garden. Blooming 
 of century plants, for example, which 
 fortunately happens every five or 
 ten years, instead of every hundred. 
 It is exciting to watch the great, red- 
 dish flower stalk shoot up at the rate 
 of six to nine inches a day almost as 
 high as the house's roof. This blos- 
 soming, it must be said, is the end 
 of the plant. It withers down and 
 leaves only a litter of tiny plants like 
 it, the likeliest of which we choose 
 and set in its lamented parent's 
 place. The generations of century 
 plants scarcely know one another. 
 That is badly contrived. It is an 
 instance of how we human beings 
 have done well not to be vegetables. 
 
 The garden's corners are filled 
 with a large-leaved shrub with great 
 white bell-flowers. It is called datura 
 and it has always, I suppose, been in 
 
 8S 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 Florida gardens. But we by some 
 chance had not seen it until once we 
 were in Algiers and saw it in the 
 Jardin Botanique there, in a long 
 allee with Algerians in wonderful 
 Arab costumes walking gravely there. 
 My mother, abetted by me, deter- 
 mined that this lovely giant lily, 
 which they called Justitia, should 
 adorn the back-yard botanique in 
 Florida. We got prices and florist's 
 address and investigated questions of 
 shipping and customs duties, and thus 
 prepared elaborately for the order 
 that should go another year from the 
 Floridian to the African coast. And 
 then returned to our village to find 
 Justitia, inadequately described, so 
 we felt, as datura growing in almost 
 everyone's garden but our own. I 
 feel as if here again a profound phil- 
 osophical truth about life and gar- 
 dens is just eluding me. 
 
 A Frenchwoman, born and reared 
 in the far Seychelles in the Indian 
 Ocean and cast by the strange tides 
 of life upon our shores to eke out a 
 difficult existence by classes and 
 conferences, found, growing wild and 
 
 86 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 unconsidered upon our sand dunes by 
 the sea, a green herb which is in that 
 remote East considered a rare table 
 delicacy. It is called '* bred," and 
 out of it she cooked a singularly 
 distasteful dish which, eaten with a 
 terrifically hot chutney, gave her the 
 most exquisite pleasure. Here, too, 
 one sees that same philosophical 
 truth just around the corner. 
 
 If, indeed, wisdom were our goal, 
 doubtless much might be found in 
 simple garden lore. Why, my mother 
 used to ask, is the most delicate of 
 begonias, the frail pink blossoms of 
 which, borne on slender translucent 
 stems, rest like a sunset cloud all 
 around the bosquet — why, indeed, is 
 this called a *' beefsteak begonia"? 
 Is it because beefsteak from Chicago 
 is the luxurious ideal of the native 
 Floridian cracker for dinner? Why, 
 we used to ask her, did she so value 
 a potted palm, purchased at great 
 expense, when it could scarcely be 
 distinguished, except for its inferior 
 beauty, from the palmetto scrub 
 which grew wild everywhere? Far 
 fetched and dear bought, my grand- 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 father would have sagely quoted! 
 Why could house painters and such 
 folk never see the beauty of her 
 favorite tangle of red roses and trum- 
 pet vine and star jasmine which 
 climbed by her window to the roof, 
 and there, so they asserted, harbored 
 mosquitoes and tore down the tin 
 gutters? 
 
 The garden was often a battlefield 
 between beauty and utility, though I 
 scarcely know whether I can thus 
 describe the regular yearly discus- 
 sions as to whether the croquet court 
 should be made into a rose garden. 
 I think it was in the end spared to 
 sport — a temperate form, indeed — 
 because we sometimes played upon 
 it a game called golf-croquet I had 
 learned one afternoon in England 
 from James Matthew Barrie, and 
 because my mother once had met 
 him there and wished, I think, that 
 he was her son. 
 
 The garden is just nothing at all, 
 I suppose, but when the sea breeze 
 coming from the Indies farther south 
 pours over it, and red birds twinkle 
 by, and ** mockers" sing, and roses 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 (mostly pink — she liked that) burst 
 into riotous bloom, it seems some- 
 thing. At night in the late spring, 
 as one looks out on its shadowy 
 stretch, seemingly greater in dark- 
 ness, and the west wind blows the 
 scent of orange blossoms into the 
 little house where she lived, and, if 
 the moon is full, silly mockingbirds, 
 deluded into the belief that they are 
 nightingales, sing almost till the sun 
 rises, it is to us who live in it a small 
 patch of paradise. 
 
 The gardener — have I already said 
 so.? — ^believes in very truth that she 
 walks there, and that sometimes 
 early in the morning when the dew 
 is on the lawn — we have lawns in- 
 deed, rare in Florida! — he can some- 
 times catch her voice giving him the 
 simple orders of the day, that he 
 shall trim a rose bush, or transplant 
 spinach, or pull up an intruding 
 pepper plant. It is just the humble 
 routine things he hears that make 
 me half believe in them. I know 
 that if she lives she wants to know 
 every detail of her children's lives 
 and that she will want us to know 
 
 89 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 that she thinks I had better plant 
 petunias, and that my sister's new 
 skirt, which the gardener's wife is 
 constructing, would be prettier with 
 two flounces instead of one. 
 
 That is the kind of thing she 
 would communicate to us, not some 
 vague description of what life upon 
 a higher plane is like. I know that 
 if she can bridge the chasm it is for 
 the simple purpose of being with us 
 in each trivial moment of our lives. 
 And there is no idle half hour of my 
 existence when just to think of her 
 is not the lighting of a flame upon 
 the altar that she would wish. If I 
 will let her, she will be in every rose 
 I cut and in every shirt and sock I 
 put on of a morning, living in some 
 real sense in all the material world 
 that is around me. 
 
 Is it very diff"erently — I say this 
 in all reverence — ^that one thinks ot 
 God and of His saints, who color 
 the universe, if one will let them, with 
 something of comradeship and love? 
 Now that she who was the first 
 source and fountain of my life is 
 gone, I feel sometimes that I am left 
 
 90 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 among strangers; there Is no affec- 
 tion except the mother's for her child 
 that can creep so close in every 
 trivial, tender detail of life. But can 
 that love die, even if death is indeed 
 the end of the individual, if even per- 
 sonality shall vanish and be scat- 
 tered like ashes to the wind? Is 
 there not a kind of immortality in 
 the power of the living to bestow? 
 Does not memory forever work a 
 miracle? 
 
 The mulberry festival has com- 
 menced this week, and in the soft 
 airs of spring which blow the world 
 away it seems as important an event 
 as those more disturbing ones of 
 which those strange agitated news- 
 papers from the metropolis are full. 
 I wonder if death is not a little like 
 the southeast wind, that blows life 
 away and yet leaves together those 
 who have loved one another. 
 
 91 
 
VI 
 
 IT is the tradition of biographers, 
 not quite so commonly of auto- 
 biographers, that it is the faults of 
 a character which make it human 
 and living. I have always rather 
 doubted this, though the doctrine 
 gives one an agreeable excuse for 
 pointing out the defects of others. 
 Yet I mean to conform to the tradi- 
 tion. As I remember my mother it 
 is not bad qualities which stand out. 
 Indeed, I am inclined to believe she 
 was very good. But I shall do my 
 best to blink at this goodness. 
 
 My parent's persistent and out- 
 standing fault was of being by nature 
 and, so I affirmed, by intention late. 
 She could not and she would not be 
 on time. It was a necessity for her, 
 but it was, too (so it seemed to a 
 person like myself, passionately on 
 time), always a pleasure. Not to be 
 on time gives a person of my tem- 
 perament a hurried, hunted feeling; 
 
 92 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 it gave her a sensation of ease. To 
 be on time would have been to be a 
 slave; to be late was to be master of 
 your soul. 
 
 It was a family tradition, my 
 mother's lateness; it began, so the 
 story went, at her birth. My grand- 
 mother's birthday was on the 17th 
 of January. My mother arrived on 
 the i8th, just one day too late, my 
 grandmother always said, to be a 
 birthday gift. 
 
 The gap between promise and per- 
 formance was reduced as the good 
 little Adelaide grew up; instead of a 
 day late she was sometimes only a 
 quarter or a half hour or even only 
 ten minutes. But she was always 
 late, bless her. 
 
 My temper did not always stand 
 the strain upon it. At such moments 
 I used ironically to point out to her 
 that she always caught trains, prov- 
 ing that she could. And she an- 
 swered, smilingly, that of course she 
 could be on time for trains — ^one had 
 to be. But one hadn't to be for one's 
 son whom one loved. I asked her 
 despairingly if my wishes could 
 
 93 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 make promptness seem compulsory. 
 I pointed out the inefficiency of 
 wasting my valuable time by keeping 
 me waiting. I begged her wildly to 
 consider the wear and tear upon my 
 nerves, the depletion of my vital 
 energy. And she listened patiently, 
 even tenderly — and was late next 
 time. The nearest she ever came to 
 making out a case for herself was once 
 when she told me, with almost a 
 touch of hauteur, that it was excel- 
 lent discipline for me to control my 
 nerves and that possibly she was 
 doing me a real service in keeping 
 me waiting. 
 
 How can one ever know how many 
 eccentricities of women are devised 
 for the purpose of disciplining men, 
 or how many times, when ladies are 
 late, it is at the cost of considerable 
 inconvenience to them, but for our 
 good.? Such things are possible; 
 such thoughts may lurk in the re- 
 cesses of the female mind. This 
 question of being on time is one 
 which has divided the sexes from 
 time immemorial. And the great 
 logical advantage which the sex 
 
 94 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 which is late has over the one which 
 is prompt is that they, quite obvi- 
 ously, lose no time waiting. We, as 
 a sex, are constantly in danger of 
 being destroyed by the time we con- 
 sume at restaurant entrances and in 
 hotel lobbies. 
 
 I gladly absolve my parent of 
 any deep-seated plan to be late; it 
 was indeed the lovely, instinctive 
 flowering of her nature. My sister, 
 who is herself no bad hand at not 
 being ready, always maintained that 
 mother had no sense of time. And I 
 believe this was perhaps so, that she 
 measured it only by the pleasure she 
 was finding as it passed, or by the 
 fatigue which indicated that some- 
 how it must already have passed. 
 And I detect here, in spite of my 
 coarser masculine instinct for prompt- 
 ness, the beginnings of a higher wis- 
 dom, of a measurement of time by 
 some higher standard than that of 
 the gross mechanical pendulum. 
 
 I used to assert that my mother's 
 ideal would be to start to dress for 
 dinner as dinner was announced, and 
 she would reply, her eyes shining, 
 
 95 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 that it would certainly be the way 
 to eliminate waste of time. 
 
 I dare say in her heart she ad- 
 mitted that never to be on time was 
 a fault. But she had too great a 
 sense of humor to believe for an in- 
 stant that it was a very grave fault. 
 And what shall I say.? I started to 
 prove her faults, but the first one I 
 tackle now somehow looks engaging 
 to me, and in a world where there is 
 too little charm if a thing is engaging 
 is it a fault.f* Even in one's mother? 
 
 I think a sense of the proportionate 
 value of things was at the heart of 
 her wisdom. For I think that, with 
 all her love of the sparkle of life, 
 she was deliberate and wise. There 
 are a few of her girlhood friends 
 still who can talk to me about her. 
 And the thing I like most to hear, 
 aside from her having had the pret- 
 tiest clothes, is that they all came 
 to her for counsel, knowing that 
 Addie had a sound common sense 
 well poised amid the storms of their 
 girlhood. 
 
 Not that the storms were much. 
 Girlhood was, 1 believe, a very sweet 
 
 96 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 and simple and natural thing in those 
 days in America, and the problems 
 brought to my mother that was to 
 be were not of the kind which shake 
 the world. I knew at the beginning 
 that I was starting to write a chron- 
 icle *'of small potatoes," as they 
 would have said when my mother 
 and my father were young. But I 
 believe that the lives of so many 
 good and happy people are mostly 
 spent in dealing with these small 
 potatoes. I believe, too, that out of 
 the serene, clear sunshine of such a 
 period in our national life came the 
 strength and heroisms of the Civil 
 War, And of something akin to this 
 simplicity of young lives must come, 
 I believe, the happiness of a more 
 simple, more democratic, less luxuri- 
 ous life in the future now. 
 
 I remember being told of a visit 
 to some Kentuck}?" cousins made 
 when my mother was a quite young 
 girl, before the war. A brother of 
 my grandfather had, with some 
 queer Connecticut eccentricity, set- 
 tled there on the westward migra- 
 tion instead of in northern Ohio. 
 
 97 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 There was a white-pillared house 
 that was set in a blooming garden, 
 and the one night my mother loved 
 to tell of was when by moonlight a 
 band of young men and young ladies 
 pelted one another with roses as if 
 they were snowballing in the colder 
 North. I think of that flowery, ro- 
 mantic night as typical of all that 
 serene period. Even then alarums and 
 excursions were not far away. Uncle 
 Augustus had been loyal to his 
 Northern bringing-up, and there was 
 a legend, delight of my boyhood, of 
 how he had lain a week hidden from 
 the Confederates in the shock of 
 corn in one of his own fields, while 
 by night one of my mother's girl 
 cousins secretly brought him food. 
 Such stories were the perquisite of 
 little boys born in the 'seventies. 
 
 I cannot remember many con- 
 vincing anecdotes of my mother's 
 girlhood wisdom, though I do re- 
 member a delightful and terrific 
 anecdote which, as girl and boy, my 
 sister and I delighted to hear. I am 
 a little vague about it, but I know it 
 took place at a picnic and an exuber- 
 
 98 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 ant and delightful cousin — she is 
 still, at eighty, all that — in what may 
 seem an excess of girlish gayety, 
 launched a piece of pie at a gentle- 
 man with peculiarly glossy straw- 
 colored whiskers. The anecdote had 
 to deal, I believe, with the attitude 
 apologetic or otherwise which the 
 all-too-lively Sophia should have 
 adopted, a matter upon which she at 
 once sought Adelaide's advice. I 
 ought, I know, to be chiefly inter- 
 ested in that advice, but my mind 
 has always dwelt rather on the pie- 
 throwing itself, and as the movies 
 came into vogue I was glad to see 
 what an eternally sound comic value 
 pie had. 
 
 The picnic had taken place at Nel- 
 son's Ledge, a favorite spot for such 
 simple pleasures, where rocks broke 
 picturesquely through the pretty 
 northern Ohio woods and there were 
 caves and dangerous almost moun- 
 tainous paths — "lovers' lanes,'* no 
 doubt. Picnics should never go out 
 of vogue; they are typical of two 
 pleasures of which no distracted con- 
 dition of the world can ever deprive 
 
 99 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 us — the happiness which comes from 
 contemplating the beauties of nature 
 and the gayety which wells as from 
 the heart of youth when young men 
 and women meet. 
 
 Our fathers and mothers had less 
 paraphernalia of pleasure than we 
 of the generation after* them have 
 had. It has to do, I suppose, with 
 the history of American morals and 
 with the attitude, perhaps, of the 
 churches toward certain of the devil's 
 devices. But there must have been 
 a period in northern Ohio when 
 dancing was out of vogue. My ma- 
 ternal grandfather had been rather 
 famous at it. At balls he had worn 
 knee breeches, and it was evident 
 from the way, even in old age, he 
 spoke, that he "had had a leg." He 
 talked of fiddlers, and of the tune of 
 "Money Musk," and of balls in log 
 cabins to which he went horseback 
 on winter nights through wolf-in- 
 fested woods, carrying his lady, gen- 
 erally Maria Kent, whom he married 
 when she was eighteen, behind him 
 on a pillion. Is it not incredible 
 that in northern Ohio pioneer and 
 
 100 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 colonial days lay so close behind us, 
 who are not even yet quite superan- 
 nuated in the world? My mother 
 has been of another period. As a 
 girl she does not seem to have 
 danced. So it happened that she 
 and my father learned to dance about 
 the same time I as a child at dancing 
 school did. I say *' learned" with 
 hesitation about my father — he never 
 really did. But my mother seemed 
 to me to waltz especially with a 
 quite ineffable grace and dignity. 
 Their dancing class was in the 
 evening in a house so magnificent as 
 to have a ballroom where ordinary 
 houses only had attics. And their 
 season ended always with a fancy- 
 dress evening. The excitement was 
 for my sister and me intense. Once 
 my mother wxnt as a Spanish girl, 
 once as *' Night" with a great black 
 tarlatan veil sewed thick with silver 
 stars. (Didn't everybody's mother, 
 in that Victorian day, go at least 
 once as "Night," so sweetly and sym- 
 bolically attired?) My father, who 
 had suflFered torments at the idea of 
 fancy dress, went both times as a 
 
 lOI 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 monk. (Didn't embarrassed gentle- 
 men for a whole century go so 
 disguised?) 
 
 That my mother and I were begin- 
 ning to be dancers at about the same 
 time was amusing. I owe what was 
 my facility in the waltz to a great 
 deal of practice at odd moments with 
 her — if I had a minute before dinner 
 was ready I waltzed to the dining 
 room, an informal but pleasant com- 
 radeship. 
 
 Comradeship is what I would 
 especially recommend to mothers 
 anxious to win their children's hearts. 
 Comrade is what my mother was — • 
 to the end. Any recommendation of 
 perfection is made with more hope- 
 fulness to mothers than to their 
 sons, because I humbly realize that, 
 though I was perhaps a good son, she 
 was always a better mother — ^per- 
 haps the superiority of mothers is 
 divinely implicit in their very ex- 
 istence. My mother would have 
 rewritten the Latin nihil humanum 
 — -restricting it to merely that noth- 
 ing that had to do with her children 
 could ever be alien to her. 
 
 102 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 She wanted always to be with us, 
 always to do the things we were 
 doing, if they were consistent with 
 her dignity of a mother. Yet she 
 never gave us, nor anyone else, I 
 think, the impression that she wanted 
 to be young, only that she wanted to 
 be with young people like her 
 children. 
 
 This was the real flattery with 
 which she enchained us to her — ■ 
 that she made us feel that we always 
 held her interest. She rarely praised 
 us; she never told me, Fm sure, 
 that I was anything exceptional or 
 wonderful, though I have suspected 
 that to others she expressed a more 
 exaggerated appreciation. But with 
 us her tone was rather as if she never 
 said we were anything wonderful 
 because, considering the matter tem- 
 perately, she knew we weren't, of 
 course, but that, nevertheless, we 
 interested and delighted her more 
 than anyone else in the whole world; 
 and if this were a weakness, a per- 
 sonal idiosyncrasy, she felt sure we 
 would forgive it. With such tactics 
 she was of course irresistible. 
 
 103 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 It Is a small thing, but we never 
 sat through a meal in that silence 
 which so often seems to grip families, 
 people in strange hotels sometimes 
 told us afterward that they had not 
 supposed we could be related we 
 seemed so interested in talking to 
 one another. I would not convey 
 the impression of anything chilling 
 or formal. There was plenty of in- 
 formality, and not always, I am 
 afraid, at least on my part, very good 
 manners. I am sometimes forgetful, 
 and again often unduly proud of 
 being a reasonable being and despis- 
 ing les petits soins. I don't believe 
 in gentlemen who lay stress on al- 
 ways rising when their wives enter a 
 room and then go home and beat 
 them to a pulp. I say 1 like to be- 
 lieve that I abound in a kindness 
 beyond form. Mother, if she were 
 here, would probably say again 
 that I am like Eugene. This needs 
 explanation. 
 
 Eugene was a happy-natured ne- 
 gro, now serving a term in stripes on 
 the Florida roads because of an 
 ingenious method of burglary he 
 
 104 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 practiced. He was engaged one day 
 in trying to borrow two dollars from 
 my mother. This was to help pay 
 his fare to a mythical Babtown, New 
 York, whence he claimed to have 
 come. He dilated upon the tender 
 feelings which drew him back, and 
 finally in a climax depicted the ad- 
 mirable family life he had led by 
 saying: 
 
 "Why, Mis' Rhodes, I had four- 
 teen sisters and I never hit a one of 
 them!" 
 
 I agree with my mother that I am 
 a little like that. I may have failed 
 sometimes in courtliness of manners 
 to her and to my sister, but I really 
 never hit a one of them. 
 
 Talking and writing are, I sup- 
 pose, what I have chiefly been con- 
 cerned with in life. And I know I 
 talked my best for my mother. She 
 never failed of giving me that ulti- 
 mate flattery of being a good audi- 
 ence. And I know that, however 
 poor a proof of her intelligence it 
 may be, her interest in what I might 
 have to say was at least fresher and 
 more genuine than anyone else's. 
 
 los* 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 But for all this, I think I felt all 
 along that she expected not to be put 
 off with anything short of my best 
 in thought and speech. I think, with 
 all the perfect informality and inti- 
 macy she made both her children 
 feel that being with her was a social 
 event, and that because she preferred 
 our society to any other she expected 
 us to do what we could to justify her 
 in this odd choice. If I have made 
 myself in the least clear, I have, I 
 believe, told one of the secrets I 
 would like to tell to sons and mothers. 
 The assistance which my mother 
 could give me in my trade of writing 
 was chiefly as a critic of English 
 style, and if I dwell upon her taste 
 in the language it is not because I 
 think her services to me bulk large 
 in the cosmos, but because I think 
 it is agreeable and significant that a 
 daughter of Solon could render them. 
 She had not been brought up in a 
 reading community, nor educated, 
 either at the village school or later 
 at the Eclectic Institute at Little 
 Hiram on the hill, much beyond 
 what is the ordinary high-school 
 
 1 06 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 standard of to-day. But I think 
 that the famous power of adaptation 
 of the American woman is partly a 
 certain sense of personal fastidious- 
 ness, a kind of uncultivated distinc- 
 tion of mind which is implicit in 
 American blood of the old stock, 
 which comes almost unconsciously 
 into play if any attempt at literary 
 criticism is demanded. I don't 
 know whether my mother remem- 
 bered any rules about split infini- 
 tives, but she would have been 
 vaguely irritated by the presence of 
 one in my writing, and in subtler 
 less codified questions of taste she 
 was quite sure to be right. 
 
 She belonged, of course, to a gener- 
 ation which had an impassioned 
 belief in education and an almost 
 childish reverence for the great 
 achievements of the mind. My 
 father had had an exuberant delight 
 in literature — he plunged about in 
 it with loud cries, rather like a boy 
 enjoying the surf. But his taste, as 
 masculine taste should perhaps be, 
 was a little riotous. He, too, had 
 been a writer, his chief achievement 
 
 107 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 having been a series of letters from 
 Europe to the Cleveland paper, in 
 that happy age when the simple 
 transatlantic trip was a great ad- 
 venture for Ohio and one could in- 
 dulge oneself to the full in descrip- 
 tions of the Strand or the Boule- 
 vard des Italiens, sure that to one's 
 readers they would seem new and 
 wonderful. 
 
 Again 1 am struck with the great 
 part of American history which is 
 the story of the effect of Europe, and 
 am glad that in my parents as well 
 as in myself I saw its workings. We 
 have perhaps come now into a period 
 which will rather be of the effect of 
 America on Europe. And if we as a 
 nation are in danger of being too 
 proud of the benefits we are about 
 to confer upon that continent, it 
 would be well to remember in some 
 humility what we and our parents 
 and our grandparents derived from 
 over there. 
 
 I believe it gives a certain tonic 
 quality to life, as well as a sense of 
 standing on foundations, to realize 
 how in ourselves there are traits of 
 
 1 08 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 those who have gone before. And 
 now, almost more than ever, it is well 
 that we should all think occasionally 
 of our parents and our grandparents 
 in order that we may more self- 
 consciously be American and add to 
 our own sense of obligation toward 
 the world — if happily we feel that — 
 the sense of the country's debt to 
 other countries. It makes for na- 
 tionalism and internationalism at the 
 same time, which paradoxical goal 
 is really aimed at by the most gener- 
 ous-hearted to-day, is it not? 
 
 But I am perhaps venturing far 
 afield, since I was trying only to tell 
 something of the pleasant intimacy 
 there may be between a mother and 
 her children. 
 
 I know what I got out of being a 
 son. I can, after all, only conjecture 
 what her rewards were for being a 
 mother. One thing, for example, the 
 child is given, is the sense of being 
 young; he is, after all, always young 
 to her, even as his hair grows gray. 
 But does his mother have the com- 
 plementary feeling that she is always 
 old, and does this sense deepen and 
 
 109 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 become oppressive as real old age 
 slowly creeps on her? At how much 
 of inner sacrifice of herself does she 
 buy for her child his eternal youth? 
 What is the inner truth, told only in 
 the inner chamber of a woman's soul, 
 about the happiness that comes from 
 sacrifice? There is not much sacri- 
 fice about being a child, even a 
 fairly affectionate and kind child. 
 But the potential sacrifices of those 
 who bear us are without limit. 
 
 With my mother went my youth. 
 I do not say this to ask any sym- 
 pathy. I do not mean even to assert 
 that it is a sad thing. I only observe 
 it as a thing which I had not known 
 was bound to happen to me, though 
 I now suppose it happens to every- 
 one. I do not feel that there is now 
 anyone much older than I am in all 
 the world. I have, at any rate, 
 grown up at last; I am wholly re- 
 sponsible for myself. As a matter of 
 fact, I have been wholly responsible 
 for years, and I have almost never 
 asked advice. So that it is perhaps 
 being alone that I mean instead of 
 being old. 
 
 no 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 We never talked of the possibility 
 of death for her. I suppose we did 
 not much think of it. If that were 
 to inhabit a fool's paradise, I really 
 cannot see much that could have 
 been gained by facing the inevitable. 
 Perhaps, though, she faced it, and 
 faced it alone — and that this is part 
 of the measureless tragedy and sac- 
 rifice of motherhood, to hide from 
 one's children the coming of the day 
 when they must be left alone. 
 
 I can only remember one occasion 
 when she spoke of the possibility of 
 death to me. As she grew older it 
 seemed as if a swarm of minor weak- 
 nesses and ailments buzzed about her, 
 and pain seemed to be always lurk- 
 ing, ready to pounce upon her tired 
 body. Pain grew not to be so much 
 unbearable as, in one form or an- 
 other, continuous. That I am sure is 
 what happens to old people as they 
 go to ruin. I suppose we younger 
 people do not understand. This 
 once she was a little tired, and so 
 told me that she sometimes wondered 
 whether, if the pains grew greater, it 
 would really be much pleasure to 
 
 III 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 live. I assured her almost lightly 
 that it would be, and we dropped the 
 subject. But I wonder sometimes 
 whether it is not easy to bear an- 
 other's pain. 
 
 It would be perhaps too much to 
 ask of a mother to live into too much 
 pain and too many years. Yet there 
 is not much children do not ask. 
 And nothing mothers do not try to 
 give. I am sure she would have 
 tried to live forever, for our sake. 
 
 112 
 
VII 
 
 IT is a very common thing to say 
 that the edge of grief wears dull 
 with years, and that it is a blessed 
 thing. Perhaps it wears dull, per- 
 haps it is blessed that it should be, 
 if it is so. I am still at the stage of 
 wondering. 
 
 The paroxysms pass, both mind 
 and body fall back into something of 
 the old routine activities. Life is 
 not intolerable without those who 
 have gone. But it is forever different. 
 
 Life is for most of us rather like a 
 picture which composes around cer- 
 tain personalities. When one has 
 grown old enough to be used to the 
 picture the blotting out of one of its 
 chief elements seems to make what 
 is left ill composed and meaningless. 
 The significance of half the minor 
 events, of the trivial gayeties, of the 
 small jokes, of all the detail of every- 
 day life which made it bearable, is 
 gone without my mother's answering 
 
 113 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 gleam in the eye, her pleasant passing 
 comment. 
 
 Of course we try to keep her with 
 us (we do this only half consciously, 
 I think) by bursting forth about 
 many a small and absurd event that 
 it is a shame that she should be 
 missing it. It is in the minor hap- 
 penings of life that one misses an 
 absent comrade. In the great crises, 
 in the moments of great happiness 
 or of great suffering, one is somehow 
 willing to stand alone. It is when 
 the laundress has said something 
 amusing about the condition of my 
 underwear that I want to share the 
 fun with my mother. 
 
 Without the comradeship of one 
 who has been a gay dear friend the 
 w^orld's events seem to fall into new 
 and perhaps wiser valuations. That, 
 it seems to me, is something of what 
 people mean by the lesson of sorrow, 
 the greater sympathy which one 
 wins by suffering, merely that one 
 sees that few things have much im- 
 portance beyond what comradeship 
 gives them. In a revalued world it 
 is not so hard as it once was to go 
 
 114 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 without things. The deeply and 
 genuinely bereaved man is the se- 
 rener for his loss. He is, so long as 
 his memory lasts of the beautiful 
 thing he has lost, poised somehow 
 above the minor good and evil of the 
 world. He has less wish to live and 
 so less fear to die, through a greater 
 willingness to do either, as fate shall 
 decide. 
 
 For most people, I think, the ques- 
 tion of immortality only arises really 
 from the grave of some dead loved 
 one. And life, at any rate, takes on 
 a new and solemn interest. The sun 
 never again sets in somber glory 
 without asking you to contemplate 
 the world as something which may 
 be a mere veil. If eyes that once 
 looked at us with love are looking 
 at the odd pattern of human life 
 from the other side, we must at least 
 hope that it seems to them better 
 designed than it sometimes appears 
 to us. 
 
 The question of the life after death 
 would take more than one little book, 
 as it has already taken its thousand 
 thousands. Here there is not wisdom 
 
 "5 
 
A GIFT BOOK 
 
 or science enough to make even one 
 chapter. But I do know that be- 
 cause love has gone there is no ruin 
 of the beauty of love which has 
 been. Every great human affection 
 is immortal; so, perhaps, is every 
 smallest. Memory is the miracle 
 worker. If you can remember the 
 dead with a heart passionate enough, 
 they do not die at least until you so 
 go yourself. And then if you, too, 
 sleep eternally, shall they not sleep 
 as well ? 
 
 There was in our garden a red 
 climbing rose which my mother had 
 planted and then despaired of be- 
 cause it would never bloom. It 
 grew riotously, and upon wires strung 
 for it between the fig trees it clam- 
 bered almost the whole length of the 
 croquet court. But for four years or 
 more it never showed traces of 
 flowering, and my mother had finally 
 condemned it. That last autumn 
 she told me that if in the coming 
 spring it still refused to blossom it 
 was to be removed from the garden, 
 and a more docile bush set in its place. 
 
 She died in January, and in April 
 
 ii6 
 
FOR MY MOTHER 
 
 the Hiawatha rose flowered for the 
 first time, a blaze of scarlet and 
 gold, as she had meant it should be. 
 It has not blossomed since. Was it 
 a signal? It is not altogether pre- 
 posterous to me. There is something 
 which, every gardener knows, makes 
 plants grow, not sun nor soil nor 
 rain, but something the gardener 
 himself brings to the garden. If 
 anything could know that she wan- 
 dered down the old paths it would 
 perhaps be a rose bush. I had rather 
 that it had been one of her children. 
 But I disdain no hint that the rose 
 is my brother and that the whole 
 shining green world is bound to- 
 gether in some confraternity of love 
 beyond my power to apprehend. If 
 moods come when the comrade I 
 have liked most still seems for me 
 to live in the budding bush and the 
 southeast wind and the redbird's 
 twinkling song, why, then, I am 
 glad. 
 
 THE END 
 
 "7