ent, that to get any inkling of dynamic child-consciousness we must
understand something of parent-consciousness.

We assert that the parent-child love-mode excludes the possibility of
the man-and-woman, or friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that the
polarity of the first four poles is inconsistent with the polarity of
the second four poles. Nay, between the two great fields is a certain
dynamic opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that in the natural
course of life there is no possibility of confusing parent love and
adult love.

But we are mental creatures, and with the explosive and mechanistic
aid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a
destructive degree, not in a positive or constructive.

Let us return then. In the ordinary course of development, by the time
that the child is born and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul of
the mother is engaged: first, with the children, and second, on the
further, higher plane, with the husband, and with her own friends. So
that when the child reaches adolescence it must inevitably cast abroad
for connection.

But now let us remember the actual state of affairs to-day, when the
poles are reversed between the sexes. The woman is now the responsible
party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. She is the conscious guide
and director of the man. She bears his soul between her two hands. And
her sex is just a function or an instrument of power. This being so,
the man is really the servant and the fount of emotion, love and
otherwise.

Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all perverted
processes, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving an
exhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverter
of life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age of
thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pity
which is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, a
true modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside
himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be.

Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looks
abroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothing
more. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got her
children.

A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_
parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate,
and adult in provocation. The mo