There are similar cases of brothers who clash, but they are not so evident, for when men do not agree they leave one another alone.  Women do not seem to be able to do that.  It is good to leave one another alone when there is the clashing tendency, but it is better to conquer the clashing and learn to agree.

So long as the normal course of my life leads me to live with some one who rubs me the wrong way I am not free until I have learned to live with that some one in quiet content.  I never gain my freedom by running away.  The bondage is in me always, so long as the other person’s presence can rouse it.  The only way is to fight it out inside of one’s self.  When we can get the co-operation of the other so much the better.  But no one’s co-operation is necessary for us to find our own freedom, and with it an intelligent, tolerant kindliness.

“Mother, you take that seat.  No, not that one, Mother—­the sun comes in that window.  Children, move aside and let your grandmother get to her seat.”

The young woman was very much in earnest in seeing that her mother had a comfortable seat, that she had not the discomfort of the hot sun, that the children made way for her so that she could move into her seat comfortably.  All her words were thoughtful and courteous, but the spirit and the tone of her words were quite the reverse of courteous.  If some listener with his eyes shut had heard the tone without understanding the words he might easily have thought that the woman was talking to a little dog.

Poor “Mother” trotted into her seat with the air of a little dog who was so well trained that he did at once what his mistress ordered.  It was very evident that “Mother’s” will had been squeezed out of her and trampled upon for years by her dutiful daughter, who looked out always that “Mother” had the best, without the first scrap of respect for “Mother’s” free, human soul.

The grandchildren took the spirit of their mother’s words rather than the words themselves, and treated their grandmother as if she were a sort of traveling idiot tagged on to them, to whom they had to be decently respectful whenever their mother’s eye was upon them, and whom they ignored entirely when their mother looked the other way,

It so happened that I was sitting next to this particular mother who had been poked into a comfortable seat by her careful daughter.  And, after a number of other suggestions had been poked at her with a view to adding to her comfort, she turned to me and in a quaint, confidential way, with the gentle voice of a habitual martyr, and at the same time a twinkle of humor in her eye, she said “They think, you know, I don’t know anything.”