“In my loathing of her I experienced all over again the harsh and bitter judgments through which I had lived in the first years after my husband’s death. I had secretly held the unknown woman responsible for his end, but of course it never occurred to me to find out about her, and I certainly could never have brought myself to hear her name, much less to see her. I have at least done better than that in regard to the mother of my ‘grandson,’ and Heaven knows I have tried in all humility and heartbreak to help her. She fairly hated me, as she did anything that reminded her of my son--the entire episode had seemed to her so unnatural, so monstrous, so unnecessary--she considered me his murderer, and I never had the courage to tell her that I agreed with her. Perhaps if I had done that, really abased myself as I was willing she should be abased, we might have come into some sort of genuine relation born of our companionship in tragedy. But I couldn’t do that, possibly because the women of my generation cannot easily change the traditional attitude towards what the Bible calls ‘the harlot.’ At any rate, I didn’t succeed in ‘saving’ her. She so obviously dreaded seeing me, and our strained visits were so unsatisfactory and painful, that I finally gave it up, and her son has apparently quite forgotten her. I am sure she tries to forget him and all the tragic scenes associated with his earliest babyhood, when I insisted not only upon ‘keeping mother and child together’ but also on keeping them with me.” After a moment’s pause she resumed: “It would have been comparatively easy for me to die when my child was little, when I still had a right to believe that he would grow up to be a good and useful man, but I lived to see him driven to his death by my own stupidity. I have encountered the full penalty for breaking the commandment to judge not. I passed sentence without hearing the evidence; I gave up the traditional rôle of the woman who loves and pities and tries to understand; I forgot that it was my mission to save and not to judge. “As I have gone back over my unmitigated failure again and again, I am sure at last that it was the sorry result of my implacable judgment of the woman I held responsible for my husband’s sin. I did not realize the danger nor the inevitable recoil of such a state of self-righteousness upon my child.”