Twilight Sleep
together by a pair of urgent eye-glasses. She asked if she might hold Pauline’s hand just a moment while she looked at her and reverenced her—and Pauline, on learning that this was the result of reading her Mothers’ Day speech in the morning papers, acceded not unwillingly.
Not that that was what Mrs. Swoffer had come for; she said it was just a flower she wanted to gather on the way. A rose with the dew on it—she took off her glasses and wiped them, as if to show where the dew had come from. "You speak for so many of us,” she breathed, and recovered Pauline’s hand for another pressure.
But she had come for the children, all the same; and that was really coming for the mothers, wasn’t it? Only she wanted to reach the mothers through the children—reversing the usual process. Mrs. Swoffer said she believed in reversing almost everything. Standing on your head was one of the most restorative physical exercises, and she believed it was the same mentally and morally. It was a good thing to stand one’s soul upside down. And so she’d come about the children. . .
The point was to form a League—a huge International League of Mothers—against the dreadful old practice of telling children they were naughty. Had Mrs. Manford ever stopped to think what an abominable thing it was to suggest to a pure innocent child that there’ was such a thing in the
world as Being Naughty? What did it open the
