Studies in Discontent.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 6, 10 February 1909, Page 57

Studies in Discontent.

BY AN IBSEN WOMAN. “If twenty years ago my husband had offered me my present position of honaekeeper, nurse and menial in general, what do you think I should have said to hunt I then had dreams of a career and ability to attain it, demonstrated by money already earned. To-day he is the success, he is the figure in life, he is the income bringer, and hence has the final word of authority in the house. I am but a part of his background, with the furniture, the library, the children. I love him dearly. I love the children dearly. Yet I catch myself asking myself of late, ‘Was it worth while?’ I hate myself for the thought, yet I brood over it. Have 1 been compensated? Are my husband’s success and the children and the companionship compensation for my abnegation?" ■». “Wait a minute. Do not answer until you are quite sure you understand what. I mean,’’ continued the speaker. ‘ Take me as I am to-day, a woman of fortythree years, not old enough to feel resigned to all things, not young enough to begin again, and not needed where L am.” “Now, that is nonsense, Adele," interrupted the other. THE CHILDREN LOOK TO THEIR FATHER. “Wait. You do not yet understand. The children have come to the point where they do not need my actual tending, as they formerly did; that is, it does not mean what it once meant—greater healthfulness. Mother has become to them one who putters and fusses a good deal about things that do not matter and knows nothing of the things that do matter Roger was plainly dumbfounded when he chanced to run across my' high school cards the other day and those of his father, and noted that my percentages ran steadily higher than his father’s. “ ‘Why, mother, how queer! ’ he exclaimed. ‘Did you really study all these once and know them better than father?’ His amazement was a revelation to me, perhaps a part of the pain I feel to-day. “I feel bitterly that I must have lost much in the hours of tending babies, looking after the house, keeping bills down and courage up, if my own child is amazed to learn that I started with an education equal to his father's! Indeed, he little realizes that his mother was thought by all her friends, in fact, to be something of a genius who married a dreamer. I was a fairly succesful portrait painter, you know. “To my children then I am merely part of the setting. In their dawning intellectual life they look solely to papa. “Wait till papa gets home,’ James says when I offer to help him with his Katin, and Roger won’t give me a glimpse, into his difficulties with algebra. ‘Wait for papa!’ If they only knew it, papa is as rust.v as I am, and no more willing to be polished up, but somehow or other they' have intellectual faith in him which they haven’t in me. I slip back again into the background after one or two such rebuffs, feeling empty, starved and unsatisfied. I don’t find reward in my life of to-day. “Lance is kindness itself, and sympathetic in a way, but not. the way of understanding. ‘Tired to-night, dear? Too much shopping!’ or ‘Susan’s sudden leave has upset you, hasn't it, dear? Never mind, the new cook is promising.’ “When I seek to find the old bonds of understanding with him, he says. ‘So you want to study, huh? Go ahead, pitch in. take anything you like. Why don't you take up your painting again? I used io think you had Sargent and the rest beat to a finish.* He, too, ‘used to think' I knew something. JXIES HE UNDERSTAND A MOTHER’S SACRIFICE. “The greatness of a mother’s aacriflco —does any man ever understand it as it is? Lance doesn’t at bottom believe that I have sacrificed anything more tluui he has. The irony of it all is that he firmly believes, in making himself,

he has made me, too. Yet the tad truth is that I am plodding far, far in the rear, my talent buried deep under the commonplace details of domestic life. '•When we started we planned to live our intellectual life together, come what might. Kitehen and nursery were not to be allowed to absorb me, as they had my mother and his. Business was not to swallow him up, to the seclusion of family life. "During the first decade J yielded ground, of necessity, I felt. Two decades have gone. Isi nee is all and more than he gave promise of being, and he has been true to the intellectual life, as he planned it, so far as concerns himself. But I have fallen out of it altogether. 1 don't know anything beyond rearing children and keeping house. ‘•■Why not break lioose —strike—go away for a time, if you feel this way?" said the world worn woman, wishing to be helpful in a crisis which she but dimly understood. "Like Nora?" replied the mother woman, faintly smiling. “I've thought of that, too—only you see Lance never remembers his rubbers when it threatens rain and his lungs haven't been strong since that attack of pneumonia—and Roger still has attacks of croup occasionally in the night, big boy that he is. Oh, I could never sleep a night away from them, for fear they might be needing me." “Chained to the wheel of maternity, is how I should describe your state, Adele. You must find your contentanent therein, or go without, since break away you will not. I envy you, that’s all I have to say,” sighed the world weary woman. -J* d*