“What are you doing?”
“My dear, don’t be a fool! You’re not going to send these letters to anyone, and as soon as I get home I mean to burn them. Reggie was a dissolute rip before ever he met Grace Castillyon, and the only woman who ruined him is—yourself! You were very angry when I told you once that the greatest misfortune which could befall a man was to have a really affectionate mother, but I assure you, except for your bad influence, Reggie would have been no worse a boy than any other.”
Mrs. Bassett turned livid.
“I think you must be mad, Mary. I’ve done all I could by example and precept to make him a gentleman. I’ve devoted my life to his education, and I’ve sacrificed myself to him absolutely from the day he was born. I can honestly say that I’ve been a good mother.”
“Pardon me,” answered Miss Ley coolly, “you’ve been a very bad mother, a very selfish mother, and you’ve systematically sacrificed him to your own whims and fancies.”
“How can you talk to me like that when I want sympathy and help? Haven’t you any pity for me?”
“None! All that has happened you’ve brought entirely on yourself. You made him a liar by compelling him to tell you his most private affairs, you drove him to deception by expecting from him an impossible purity, you warned him of temptation so as to make it doubly attractive. You never let him have a free will or a natural instinct, but insisted on his acting and feeling like a middle-aged and rather ill-educated woman. You thwarted all inclinations, and forced upon him yours. Good heavens! you couldn’t have been more selfish, cruel, and exacting if you’d detested the boy!”
Mrs. Bassett stared at her, overwhelmed.
“But I only asked common honesty and truthfulness, I only wanted to keep him from spot and stain, and I only expected the morality which religion and everything else enforces upon us.”
“You starved his instincts—the natural desire of a boy for gaiety and amusement, the natural craving of youth for love. You applied to him the standards of a woman of fifty. A wise mother lets her son go his own way, and shuts her eyes to youthful peccadillos; but you made all these peccadillos into deadly sins. After all, moralists talk a deal of nonsense about the frailty of mankind. When you come to close quarters with vice, it’s not really so desperately wicked as all that. A man may be a very good fellow though he does sit up late and occasionally drink more than is discreet, gamble a little and philander with ladies of doubtful fame. All these things are part of human nature, when youth and hot blood are joined together, and for some of them foreign nations, wiser than ourselves, have made provision.”