le.

CHAPTER XVIII

It is, perhaps, only after we have put many dreams and hopes behind us
that we stumble upon life's real gift to us. And thus it happened for
Sheila. It was as if, seeing that she held out her hands for gifts no
longer, life capriciously resolved to thrust one upon her. But beneath
the apparent caprice was a fine justice--for life was at last kind to
Sheila through her son.

As Eric grew older, there sprang up between them such a comradeship as,
even in her gladdest moments of motherhood, Sheila had never foreseen.
He was a manly boy, fond of other boys and of boyish sports, but for
all that his companionship with his mother persisted, and as he matured
somewhat, deepened into an intimate, understanding relation such as
Sheila had not thought to know again. Their kinship was not of the
flesh only; that was the thing that Sheila began presently to see.

It was then that she began to dream once more; to visualize a future
beyond her own unrealized future. But she didn't so much as stretch
out a shaping hand; she didn't say an illuminating, a determining word.
She remembered instances--many of them--of children's lives having been
moulded by their parents, and with pitiful mischance. She had known
men and women who, with entirely unconscious tyranny, had thrust
ready-made destinies on their sons and daughters, saying in extenuation:

"We want our children to do all the brave deeds we've failed to do. We
want them to fulfill our defeated ambitions and to become what we have
never become. We want to save them from our mistakes and our regrets.
We haven't done much with our own lives--but we're going to live again,
more wisely and effectually, in our children's lives."

And so they had advised and coerced, and destroyed individuality and
independence, and extinguished, only too often, the very joy of life
itself by striving to transfer the flame to a vessel of their own
choosing.

This she must not do to Eric, Sheila told herself. From the despotic
impulse of parenthood--queer mixture that it was of too zealous love
and a thoroughly selfish desire for a second chance through the medium
of the child--she must protect Eric. Therefore she restrained herself;
she simply waited--as she might have waited for a seed to spring up
from the secret sprouting place of some deep garden bed. It requires a
sort of earthy, benign patience thus to hold back one's hand and
passively wait--especially