There is no such thing as natural affection: affection has to be won, and, once it is won, to be kept by effort or to be lost again. It is always assumed that parents and children naturally adopt to one another the attitude of beatific charity, as if they could not be the severest critics and the most bitter haters one of another, when the affectionate habits of childhood have frozen into mere formalities through incompatibilities of temper. In England, where the names of mother and father are treated with every outward respect, there is far less real sentiment for them as ideas than in Latin countries. What makes the relation so close and so warm in England is the comradeship of the English and the glow of the English home, which welds a strong bond so early that an overwhelming amount of tension is required for its complete disruption. But the seeds of strife are sown inevitably in the adolescence of every family: the weeds to which they grow are hardy, too, if they are not nipped in the bud. The English mother has got to do the nipping, but with sympathy not with severity, for the tool of severity will turn against her, and she will suffer a thousand fold the pain she has inflicted thoughtlessly on her children. The truth is that all parents and children must go through a period of storm and stress, and most of the stress falls on the mothers. All young things are more or less ungrateful, and this is perfectly natural: they are following their strongest impulse in pushing their way out to full growth as ruthlessly as shoots of the rose tree. They have no time to be reflective till this irresistible impulse has weakened, so that they cannot realise before full maturity all that they have forced out of their parents in the way of self-denial, self-restraint, nervous irritation and even physical labour. For tangible pleasures and comforts they are grateful enough, but the intangible prevention of pain, the care and watching, the influence and the teaching do not become visible to them until they are almost on the far horizon of past youth. In the sharp momentary irritations of growth children cannot take these things into account, and for them a sense of injustice blots out gratitude like a sudden black fog. When they look back, and suffer from the rough contact of younger life themselves, then they see the vexed questions of their youth in truer proportions: they may not find that the wrong was always on their side, but at least they will sympathise with the pardonable weakness to which it was due, and will weigh it in the balance with benefits felt but not seen. Those families are happy who see these exasperations pass away like a short-lived storm, leaving no devastated tract behind them, but bringing calm and mellow weather in their wake. The English mind, averse from brooding, ever ready for compromise and comradeship, is a temperate climate, rejoicing in these halcyon anti-cyclones after the chilly gust and the grumbling thunder.