The mother, too, is harmless generally if she is over sixty; and even when under that age, she can do little mischief if she lives apart with her husband, beyond complaining perhaps to her neighbours that her daughter-in-law or son-in-law, as the case maybe, does not treat her with the consideration that is her due. Of course she thinks like all mothers that no partner however unexceptionable in disposition, ability, or personal appearance, can be good enough for her child; and her complaint is taken for what it is worth by her neighbours unless they really detect any flagrant breach of filial duty. But it is the widow ranging in age from forty to fifty who is the greatest disturber of domestic peace. She is too old to attract, and yet not old enough to realise that fact and abandon hope; and jealous of a younger woman in the house, she rebukes her in a dog-in-the-manger spirit for any demonstration of love when she is with her husband. She is the worst of mothers-in-law; but others run her hard. A widow under forty cannot readily acquiesce in the relegation of household authority to another woman and often wreaks vengeance for thus supplanting her by an ill-natured tongue and the imposition of degrading work; for mistress as she is of the house, the young wife has in all things, as a matter of filial duty, to submit to her mother-in-law’s will. In the present stage of Japanese society, the lack of sympathy between a man’s wife and mother is aggravated by the difference in their education. The older woman, being separated from the younger by the yawning gulf which divides Old from New Japan, cannot perceive why the ideas in which she was herself brought up should not be good enough for the other and finds fault with what are in her eyes outlandish ways introduced by the new era. She is loud in praise of the old, harping upon the ideal state of things that would have prevailed if the world had remained unchanged, and thinks that it has retrograded socially, morally, and even physically in the interval, grumbling that the weather itself has been affected by the innovations of these latter days and refuses to bring storm and sunshine in the good old downright fashion. Such women cannot be reasonably expected to get on with those of the younger generation who have passed the primary school and probably the girls’ high school and acquired a smattering of western knowledge. The instinctive antipathy between the mother-in-law and the son-in-law, which is a stock joke with the European comic press, dwindles into insignificance when compared with the feeling which sometimes arises between the former and her daughter-in-law.