gaming table for
the durable satisfactions of life that come from worth-while
intellectual pursuits is ever a disaster. What manner of children are
to be reared by a generation of bridge-experts, of women half-crazed
with the pleasures of the card-table, to whom no prize of life is as
precious as the temptation of bridge-whist. I recently heard the
recital of a bit of conversation between parent and child: "Mother, is
card playing terribly important?" "Why do you ask?" "Well, I went to
see my aunt and she was playing cards with three friends, and, when
grandmother came into the room, no one rose to meet her. So I thought
that the game must be awfully important and the prizes very fine or
they would have arisen when grandma entered, wouldn't they?"

Even if there were no fear of later conflict, it would still be the
duty of parents to give themselves to children, that is to have
something to give, to make something of themselves that their gift be
worth while. And for the giving of self there can be no substitute
though one may reinforce oneself in many ways. Parents cannot give
themselves to children vicariously. A young woman, mother of a little
one which I had expected to find with her, calmly answered my inquiry
touching the child, "A child's place is with its nurse." One begins to
understand the tale of the little girl who declared that when she was
grown she wished to be a nurse so that she might be with her children.
There may be and are times when a child's place is with its nurse if
the household be burdened with one, but to lay it down as a general
rule that a child's place is always apart from its mother and by the
side of its nurse is to disclose the manner of maternal neglect in the
homes of many well-circumstanced folk. I have said before that Lincoln
is to be congratulated rather than commiserated with upon the fact
that he had little schooling and no nurses, seeing that in the place
of schools, teachers, nurses, governesses, he had a mother and the
immediacy of her unvicarious care.

Unless parental-filial contact be direct rather than intermediate,
parents cannot help a child to be as well as to have and to do, to
live as well as to earn a livelihood. Parents can give a child little
or nothing until they learn that a child is more than a body or
intellect, a body to be fed and clothed, a mind to be furnished and
trained. When parents come to remember that a child is, not has, a
soul to be developed, th