A hard and bare youth had made me supersensitive and suspicious and
narrow. I wanted to measure other people by the standards of my own
primitive years. Out on the frontier we had judged life in the rough.
Courage and truth were the essentials. A man fought his enemies out in
the open, and made no compromises. There was nothing easy in life, no
smooth rhythm. And I tried to drag forward with me, as I went, the bold
ethics of the frontier. I resented good manners because I believed they
were a cloak of hypocrisy.

A few months after we returned to Europe the shadow of death crossed our
path, swiftly and terribly. My little son died. Other babies came to
us later, but that first little boy had brought more into my life than
all the rest of the world could ever give. He had restored my faith in
life, my hope, and for a while was all my joy.

People were kind, but I felt that many called merely because it was
"good form"--"the thing to do." Bitterness was creeping into my heart.

Yet why should it not be "the thing to do" to call on a bereaved mother?
It is a gesture of humanity. Tom seemed very far away. I felt that his
pride was hurt, perhaps his vanity; for he had boasted of the little
fellow and loved to show him off. How little I understood!

I bring myself to tell these intimate things because there is a lesson
in them for other women--because I resent that any free-born American
citizen should be handicapped by lacking so small and easily acquired a
possession as poise, poise that comes with knowledge of the simple rules
of the social game. It is my hope that this honest confession of my own
feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and
particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years.