They are still, however, bravely inspired by visions of mother-love. The faith and loyalty they forbid to lovers, is still honoured in sons. How many of Mr. Cannan's young heroines, for instance, could ever have mothered his own Renè Fourny or the "Three Pretty Men." The Mrs. Morel of D. H. Lawrence, most passionately tempestuous of all the moderns, comes very near to the ideal. Few women have lived more absolutely or continuously for, and in, their child. Yet few women can have had better excuse or more temptation to desertion, greater need for a new start. Here was no love and no home, save what she made by loyal constancy to the building up of the child she had borne.
Who would condemn more fiercely, and with more bitter tears, the teaching of these
men than the great mothers they have so nobly created?
There would be none such in life so lived.
Could any novelist have drawn for us a more mad picture of the emotions aroused by sex-licence than may be read in The Jewel in the Lotus by Rosita Forbes? The heroine, Corona, "who paints, you know," is not, professionally, a gay woman. She had, perhaps justifiably, divorced her first husband; and achieved something like real love with a Spanish Catholic, whose religion alone prevented the legal sanction. He, however, died suddenly before the story opens; and "from that time Corona deliberately cut away the soft side of life . . . she fought her lonely battle and she won."
But "she did not attempt to shut sex out of her life again. On the contrary, there were many incidents in many countries, but to no single lover did she give any part of her soul. For a little while they drifted into her life, fulfilling the need her loneliness had of companionship. She paid the price asked for affection, sympathy, kindness, and it left no mark on her. Sometimes passion took her and she loved like a man for a time and then forgot, but nothing
and no one interfered with the strange, new force she was developing."
"At thirty-five she was a woman, strong, courageous, intelligent, a brilliant conversationalist"—in fact, a popular Society Queen. Her "existence had been an orgy of sensation."
Then the boy, Gerald, came into her life. He had a "wonderful" mother: "There's nothing I would not tell her, nothing that we do not talk over." It was his plan, and hers, for him not to marry "for ages, not for ten years, if then. You see, I want to make my castle first. Then I will ask someone to live in it. I want to give my wife everything. I want to stick her up in the public view and just arrange things for her quietly."