Such searching and sifting is taking place in the consciences of many women of this generation whose sufferings, although strikingly influencing conduct, are seldom expressed in words until they are told in the form of reminiscence after the edges have been long since dulled. Such sufferings are never so poignant as when women have been forced by their personal experiences to challenge the valuable conventions safeguarding family life. A woman whom I had known slightly for many years came to Hull-House one day escorted by her little grandson. Her delicate features, which were rather hard and severe, softened most charmingly as the little boy raised his cap in good-by from the vanishing automobile. In reply to my admiring comment upon the sturdy lad and his affectionate relation to her, she startled me by saying abruptly, “You know he is really not my grandson. I have scarcely admitted the doubt before, but the time is coming when I must face it and decide his future. If you are kind enough to listen, I want to tell you my experience in all its grim sorrow. “My husband was shot twenty-seven years ago, under very disgraceful circumstances, in a disreputable quarter of Paris; you may remember something of it in the newspapers, although they meant to be considerate. I was left with my little son, and with such a horror of self-indulgence and its consequences, that I determined to rear my child in strict sobriety, chastity, and self-restraint, although all else were sacrificed to it. Through his school and college days, which I took care should be far from his father’s friends and associations, I always lived with him, so bent on rectitude and so distressed by any lack of self-control that I see now how hard and rigorous his life must have been. I meant to sacrifice myself for my child, in reality I sacrificed him to my narrow code. “The very June that he took his master’s degree, I myself found him, one beautiful morning, lying dead in his own room, shot through the temple. No one had heard the report of the revolver, for the little house we had taken was so on the edge of the college town that the neighbors were rather remote, and he must have killed himself while I sat in the moonlight, on the garden bench, after he had left me, my mind still filled with plans for his future.