Page:The Eleventh Virgin.pdf/96

Mother Grace was proud of her daughter with her restless brain in spite of the crudities of her adolescence. Cigarets and her freedom of speech were not so objectionable as her religious pose, nor indeed as that phase which comes to all youth when they feel that they are misunderstood,

Mother Grace’s pride was not that of a mother whose egotism is satisfied that she has produced an intelligent continuation of herself,

“No, you recognize me as an individual,” her daughter pointed out in what Mother Grace had come to term as one of her frequent harangues. “Most mothers refuse to recognize their children as individuals with minds and aims of their own. Usually the instinct of motherhood is merely a de- sire to perpetuate themselves or their husbands. At least women act that way. And when their children are born they say, ‘this is mine, or ‘this is my hus- band’s child’, and they don’t recognize their chil- dren’s rights at all.

“Now the fact that you gave birth to me, mother, I shall regard merely as an incident. If you hadn’t done it, somebody else would. So we won’t let the

mother and daughter relationship. stand between us