It is only too true that all the gravest problems of life are so framed that when you have succeeded with patience and labour in untying one knot, others form under your fingers. The wife, however, might be an orphan from other causes, independent of the health of the parents, and that would be the highest ideal—for example, a girl who had escaped from a fire, or a railway accident, in which both parents (alike robust) were killed. I am supposing things incredible, or at least improbable; I make cruel conjectures, but what can I do? A scolding, wicked, or jealous mother-in-law is worse than a fire and railway disaster together. Those good, courteous, intelligent mothers-in-law need not alarm themselves—those who become a second mother to their sons-in-law, who double the delights of the dual life, who bring you the valuable blessing of experience and disinterested affection, and who act in the domestic storm as conciliatory judges. Hosanna and everlasting glory to such beings, sent by Providence to double your happiness. For I only speak of others who, without being bad, are women, or rather men, with all the congenital defects of the race of Adam. The best of mothers-in-law always sees in you an intruder, a rival, a man who has robbed her of her daughter, and since she is good she will not worry you; but she will make scenes of jealousy; she will not plot against you with your wife, but will swallow so much bitterness day by day in the secret silence of her house as to enlarge her liver, so that some day or other her moral jaundice will be scattered through the atmosphere of your home, and you too will feel the bitterness. I understand and am indulgent. That bitterness is distilled from the deepest and most delicate regions of the heart. To have loved a daughter for twenty or thirty years, to have brought her into the world with pain, to have suckled her with spasms, to have educated her with a wise love, after having breathed the same air, eaten at the same table, shared bread and tears; and then for the first comer, just because he wears trousers and has an impudent moustache, to rob her of all that treasure with an arrogance as if he claimed and took his own—that is hard. And as if that were not enough, the daughter, the angel of her domestic temple, runs after the trousers and moustaches, and goes away, abandoning her mother’s and her own house, as if she were leaving a room at an hotel in which she had passed the night. Let us be just! Who will dare to throw the first stone at that poor woman, the pitiable mother? Who would dare ill treat her if she asked as a charity the favour that her daughter’s new home should be near hers, if she implored you to allow her to visit her often? Man is egotistic and feels paternity less than woman, but even if only in a slight degree he ought to understand the hidden hell of a mother-in-law who has to watch her daughter leave her own nest.