As for myself, while anxious to keep in touch with my wayward brood, I find the strain of accommodating myself to their varied requirements almost more than I can stand.  Pamela can only endure my companionship on the conditions that I smoke (which makes me ill); that I emulate the excesses of her lurid lingo (which makes me squirm), and that I paint my face (which makes me look like a modern Messalina, which I am not).  Gerald is prepared to accept me as a “pal,” provided that I play David to his Saul by regaling him on Sunday mornings with negroid melodies, which he punctuates with snorts on the trombone.  If he knew that I went to early morning service all would be at an end between us.  Finally, Anthony wants me to remain as I was and really am.  So you see that I have to lead not a dual but a triple life, and am only spared the necessity of making it quadruple by the fact that my husband is fortunately dead.  As Pamela gracefully remarked the other day, “It was a good thing for poor father that he went West to sing bass in the heavenly choir before we grew up.”  In conclusion I ought to admit that my future is not without prospects of alleviation.  Pamela has just announced her engagement to an archdeacon of pronounced Evangelical views; Gerald is meditating a prolonged tour in New Guinea with a Bolshevist mission; Anthony contemplates neither matrimony nor expatriation.

I am, Sir, Yours respectfully,

A MIDDLE-AGED MOTHER.

THE CRY OF THE CHILD AUTHOR.

SIR,—­As a novelist and dramatist whose work has met with high encomiums from Mr. J.L.  GARVIN, Mr. C.K.  SHORTER, Mr. JAMES DOUGLAS and Lord HOWARD DE WALDEN, I wish to impress upon you and your readers the hardships and restrictions which the tyranny of parental control still imposes on juvenile genius.  Though I recently celebrated my seventh birthday, my father and mother have firmly refused to provide me with either a latch-key or a motor-bicycle.  Owing to the lack of proper accommodation in my nursery my literary labours are carried on under the greatest difficulties and hampered by constant interruptions from my nurse, a vulgar woman with a limited vocabulary and no aspirates.  I say nothing, though I might say much, of the jealousy of adult authors, the pusillanimity of unenterprising publishers, the senile indifference of Parliament.  But I warn them that, unless the just claims of youth to economic and intellectual independence are speedily acknowledged, the children of England will enforce them by direct action of the most ruthless kind.  The brain that rules the cradle rocks the world.

Yours indignantly,

PANSY BASHFORD.

A DOGGEREL SUMMARY.

SIR,—­I have followed the Youth v. Age controversy with interest and venture to sum up its progress so far in ten of the worst lines in the world:—­

  There was an old don so engrossed
  In maintaining his rule of the roast
      That he made quite a scene
      When addressed as “Old bean,”
  And wrote to complain in The Post.