Novelists to-day, indeed, have given much thought to children. "You know," wrote Mr. Mackenzie, "that if I were to set down all I could remember of my childhood the work would not yet have reached beyond the fifth year." They all often remember much, with rare understanding and delicate insight. Heroes and heroines, to-day, are introduced to us in the cradle, and for many a chapter remain nursery-bound. But, curiously enough, we meet them all _at home, in a family group_. Every one of the "newest" men and women, in modern novels, were brought up by their parents (or nearest relatives), and did inherit the great gift of influences they make no attempt to hand on. To fight fate they had, at least, the traditional defence: _a self moulded by a mother's and father's love_. Fiction has not yet faced the offspring of Free Love. They are still, however, bravely inspired by visions of mother-love. The faith and loyalty they forbid to lovers, is still honoured in sons. How many of Mr. Cannan's young heroines, for instance, could ever have mothered his own Renè Fourny or the "Three Pretty Men." The Mrs. Morel of D. H. Lawrence, most passionately tempestuous of all the moderns, comes very near to the ideal. Few women have lived more absolutely or continuously for, and in, their child. Yet few women can have had better excuse or more temptation to desertion, greater need for a new start. _Here was no love and no home, save what she made by loyal constancy to the building up of the child she had borne._ Who would condemn more fiercely, and with more bitter tears, the teaching of these men than the great mothers they have so nobly created? There would be none such in life so lived. * * * * * Could any novelist have drawn for us a more mad picture of the emotions aroused by sex-licence than may be read in _The Jewel in the Lotus_ by Rosita Forbes? The heroine, Corona, "who paints, you know," is not, professionally, a gay woman. She had, perhaps justifiably, divorced her first husband; and achieved something like real love with a Spanish Catholic, whose religion alone prevented the legal sanction. He, however, died suddenly before the story opens; and "from that time Corona deliberately cut away the soft side of life . . . she fought her lonely battle and she won." But "_she did not attempt to shut sex out of her life again_. On the contrary, _there were many incidents_ in many countries, but to no single lover did she give any part of her soul. For a little while they drifted into her life, fulfilling the need her loneliness had of companionship. She paid the price asked for affection, sympathy, kindness, and _it left no mark on her_. Sometimes passion took her and she _loved like a man_ for a time and then forgot, but nothing and no one interfered with the strange, new force she was developing."