For he paid the debt of gratitude gratefully, and kept up the little home. But one day she noticed that he did not come home so early, and that when he came home he was absent-minded. He fell into the habit of spending his evenings out, and his mother wondered, and was anxious. He was not so careful about her comforts, and she was hurt. Then one day he came home and said, “Mother, I am going to get married,” and she knew that her happiness was at an end. For she knew, with a mother’s intuition, that the love which had been in her boy’s heart for her must now be shared with another woman, and that instead of having the first place in his life, she would have the second place. For a little while her jealousy is like that of a woman robbed of her lover. She hides it, and hides her hate for that girl whose simpering smile, whose prettiness, whose coy behavior, light fires in her son’s eyes, and set his pulse beating, and make him forgetful of his mother. Then the marriage takes place and the mother who has dreaded the day knows that it is her funeral. For she is like a queen whose prerogatives and privileges have been taken away by the death of the king, and by the accession of a new queen. Her place is taken from her. Her home is broken up. She is moved, with the furniture, into the new home, put into the second-best bedroom, and arranged to suit the convenience of the new household in which another woman is mistress. She knows already that she has begun to be a nuisance, and it is like a sharp dagger in her heart. She knows that the young wife is as jealous of her as she is of the young wife, because her son cannot break himself of the habit of obedience, cannot give up that respect for his mother’s principles and advice and wisdom, which is part of the very fibre of his being, because in any domestic crisis the son turns more readily to the mother than to the young woman who is a newcomer in his life, and in any domestic quarrel he takes the mother’s part rather than the wife’s. It is the law of nature. It cannot be altered, but it is the cause of heartburning and squalid little tragedies. The mother-in-law, in the corner of the sitting-room, watches the drama of the married life, and with more experience of life, because of her years, sees the young wife do foolish things, watches her blundering experiments in the great adventure of marriage, is vigilant of her failures in housekeeping, and in the management of her husband. She cannot be quite tongue-tied. She cannot refrain from criticism, advice, rebuke. Between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law there is a daily warfare of pinpricks, a feud that grows bitter with the years.