They come. They take their stand at the mother’s back. And the pitiful struggle is on. It is the mother who strikes the blows. Her first weapon (she uses it like a poison) is her love. She calls it that. “You are my only happiness,” she cries. “I have given you everything, a part of me, all you have needed. I have sacrificed everything for you. All my dreams have been for you. O, how can you permit anything to come between us?” The daughter listens. There is a selfish ring to it. But love must be forgiven for selfishness. In the schools and the churches the preliminaries of the struggle have been insidiously fought. Children owe duties to their parents and not to themselves. It was what the daughter learned at school. It is what she read between the lines of her books and heard from the lips of all around her. And now it is the murmur that rolls into her ears. It is the odor of the dead. Day after day the mother strikes with this weapon. Her red, furious eyes dripping tears, she moans it out. Her voice is like the yelp of a frantic animal. Her voice is like the whine of a woebegone fice. Her voice is cold and hard and hollow like the echo in a tomb. The beauty that has come to her daughter is a fragile thing. The lovliness she visioned is the most delicately mortal of life’s treasures. Fiercely the mother hurls herself against it, hurls the reproaches of her dead soul, the recriminations of her entombed spirit—the odors of the dead.... And her weapons are tangible things. They are sentences. They are the moral perversions with which the family unit always has fought for its preservation. They are tried things, prophetic precedents. And the beauty in the normal being is an indefinite force—a vagueness. It has no weapons with which to strike. Triumphant revolt is only for martyrs and artists. It is the losing force in normal existence. Gradually it becomes clouded in the daughter’s soul. She feels unclean. She imagines it is the beauty which is unclean. She does not know that it is the uncleanliness of the dead—the uncleanliness of her mother revealed to her in her heart by the divine light that is dying within herself. An agony comes into her. The struggle narrows to pain. Cold things reach at her heart. It leaps and flutters. She stands, her face white and a look of uncanny suffering about her eyes. The dead fingers grip fast. The mother, moaning, shuddering, her eyes gleaming, enfolds her daughter in her arms. “I dare you to take her from me,” she cries out to the man, to the friend, to the book, to the world of beauty, whatever it is toward which her daughter inclined for the divine instant of awakened soul. “I dare you. I dare you.” “Nothing can ever take me from you,” the daughter weeps. Death.