Why my mother bore only daughters will have to be referred to the new science which takes as its field the forces and the mysteries that are sovereign between the nuptials and the cradle. But the reason, as openly laughed about in the family when the family grew old enough to laugh, as laughed about in the neighbourhood, was this: Even before marriage my father and my mother had waged a violent discussion about woman's suffrage. You may not know that in Kentucky from the first the cause of female suffrage has been upheld by a strong minority of strong women, a true pioneer movement toward the nation's future now near. It seems that my father, who was a brilliant lawyer, always browbeat my mother in argument, overwhelmed her, crushed her. Unconvinced, in resentful silence, she quietly rocked on her side of the fireplace and looked deep into the coals. But regularly when the time came she replied to all his arguments by presenting him with another suffragette! Throughout her life she declined even to bear him a son to continue the argument! Her six daughters--she would gladly have had twelve if she could--were her triumphant squad for the armies of the great rebellion. Does this help to explain me to you? What next I relate about my early life is something that you perhaps have never given a thought to--children's pets and playthings: it explains a great deal. Have you ever thought of a vital difference between country children and town children? Country children more quickly throw away their dolls, if they have them, and attach their sympathies to living objects. A child's love of a doll is at best a sham: a little master-drama of the child's imagination trying to fill two roles--its own and the role of something which cannot respond. But a child's love of a living creature, which it chooses as the object of its love and play and protection, is stimulating, healthful and kicking with reality: because it is vitalised by reciprocity in the playmate, now affectionate and now hostile, but always representing something intensely alive--which is the whole main thing. We are just beginning to find out that the dramas of childhood are the playgrounds of life's battlefields. The ones prepare for the others. A nature that will cling to a rag doll without any return, will cling to a rag husband without any return. A child's loyalty to an automaton prepares a woman for endurance of an automaton. Dolls have been the undoing and the death of many wives.