The ambitious and educated American mother is a forceful creature, a strong, powerful woman. As an individual she is dead. Once she knew and had the desire for beauty. Dead fingers reached into her heart and killed it. The force of which she was doomed to become a part crushed her. The conventions of the world are stronger than its natural destinies. Those conventions—the conventions of the family—are not of the man’s making. Woman attends to her own subjugation. She preserves the spirit of the family, struggles and labors to keep it a unit, to keep its members alike. Moaning with the tyrannical lust for possession she enfolds her daughter in her arms. There are certain things in her daughter which must be killed. There is a dawning of love for “impossible” things in her daughter’s heart. There is an awakened mental curiosity, a perceptible inclination to break from the oppressiveness of the surrounding dead. In the night the daughter wonders and doubts. She would like “to get away”—to go forth free of certain fiercely applied restrictions and meet a different kind of folk, a different kind of thought. She would like to be—to feel the things she is capable of. It is all vague. Always revolt is vague and intangible for the daughters of women. Revolt is for souls still living, and the living are weaker than the dead. The living soul is a lone, individual force, its yearnings are ephemeral and undefined. The mother knows what they are. The dead always know what it is they have lost. And in this knowledge the mother is strong. But the living cannot say to itself what it wishes to gain, what it reaches to attain. Only in the stray geniuses of time has the individual soul fought desperately and triumphantly for its preservation. And there is no genius in the daughter. There is merely the divine and natural instinct for self-realization. Once the mother felt it and it was killed. Now the daughter has caught the dread disease—the contamination which starts a cold sweat under the corset stays of society; the thing which brings down upon it for its destruction the phalanxes of fierce fatuities—the moribund mercenaries employed by the home for its defense and preservation. Something happens to crystallize the revolt. It is a man outside the pale, a good man, a bad man. It is a book. It is a friend. Often the struggle is fought through little things too numerous to mention and the struggle itself too casual to classify. Sometimes it wages without a word; at other times there are blows. And at such times the enshrouding veils are torn aside. One can see the dead rise up, their pasty limbs dragging with the mould and slime of their couch. One can see them reaching their dead arms out, with the bloodless flesh hanging from them in shreds. One can watch them crawl on their bony feet and as they come close—these dead—the foul odor that issues from their sightless, twisted, rotted faces hangs like a grey smeared canopy above them.