Cleverness is a horrible word, much overworked in England: it may mean nothing but an aptitude for passing examinations with credit. She is certainly right to regard this aptitude as unimportant, but she is wrong where so often she remains indifferent while a really promising mind is slowly ruined by unsuitable teaching or unsuitable food. Few English mothers—I suspect the French of surpassing them here—manage to keep their children’s confidence in this matter. The play-hours and the friendships of school are inexhaustible subjects of conversation, but lessons quickly come under the head of things not talked about, except in a jocular way or in passing, rather embarrassed, reference. Even the best of mothers is at a disadvantage here, at least where a son is concerned, a fact cleverly illustrated in Mr Arnold Lunn’s novel “Loose Ends.” New interests, new views expressed by new human beings seize hold of him with violence, bursting in on the old close community of two, and leaving the more stable of the couple out in the cold, irritatingly faced with inability to “keep up,” though conscious all the while of no difficulty in keeping up anywhere else in the wide world. Here again, it is often her very passion which throws her out of the race with less devoted rivals: boys and girls can be intellectually as well as morally tiresome, and they feel the need for being able to indulge their tiresomeness without giving pain. As one of my friends put it: “I never talk about these things at home, it always leads to ‘Grief’.” Good schoolmasters and all schoolboys know that “grief” is fatal in the realm of ideas. Few parents can repress ‘grief’ with success, and they must pay the penalty for their over-lively concern. Their only remedy, unless they are content to relapse in their children’s eyes into dear old back numbers, is to wait till the ferment has settled down: “grief” will then neither be so frequent nor so difficult to overcome. * * * * * It is the mother more than the father who makes, and who is, the home. Her influence upon her children is incalculable, but surely it is going a little too far, especially in the case of boys, to say that during the time of their education they should not leave home or lose the influence of home. During the controversy over Mr Alec Waugh’s “Loom of Youth,” Sir Sydney Olivier wrote to the _Nation_ a letter in which were these words: “No parent should be allowed to send his boy to school in a boarding house without special excuse any more than to send him to a private lunatic asylum.”