Few of the passengers on a lake steamer, during a trip in northern waters a few years since, will ever forget a certain striking group. Mother and son, and the son’s fiancée, were off for a week’s vacation. The mother was tall and stately, with snow-white hair and a hard face deeply seamed with wrinkles, and with the fire of southern countries burning in her faded blue eyes. The son was merely a nice boy, with a pleasant face, and the girl, though not pretty, had a fresh look about her which was very attractive.
She wore an engagement ring, so he must have cared for her, but otherwise no one would have suspected it. From beginning to end, his attention was centred upon his mother. He carried his mother’s wraps, but the girl carried her own. He talked to the mother, and the girl could speak or not, just as she chose. Never for an instant were the two alone together. They sat on the deck until late at night, with the mother between them. When they changed, the son took his own chair and his mother’s, while the girl dragged hers behind them. At the end of their table in the cabin, the mother sat between them at the head. Once, purely by accident, the girl slipped into the nearest chair, which happened to be the mother’s, and the deadly silence could be felt even two tables away. The girl turned pale, then the son said: “You’ll take the head of the table, won’t you, mother?”
The steely tone of her voice could be heard by every one as she said, “No!”
The girl ate little, and soon excused herself to go to her stateroom, but the next day things were as before, and the foolish old mother had her place next to her son.
Discussion was rife among the passengers, till an irreverent youth ended it by saying: “Mamma’s got the rocks; that’s the why of it!”
Perhaps it was, but one wonders why a man should slight his promised wife so publicly, even to please a mother with “rocks!”
To the mother who adores her son, every girl who smiles at him has matrimonial designs. When he falls in love, it is because he has been entrapped—she seldom considers him as being the aggressive one of the two. The mother of the girl feels the same way, and, in the lower circles, there is occasionally an illuminating time when the two mothers meet.
Each is made aware how the other’s offspring has given the entrapped one no peace, and how the affair has been the scandal of two separate neighbourhoods, more eligible partners having been lost by both sides.
In the Declaration of Independence there is no classification of the rights of the married, but the clause regarding “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has been held pointedly to refer to the matrimonial state. If the mother would accord to her daughter-in-law the same rights she claimed at the outset of her own married life, the relation would be perceptibly smoother in many instances.