Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/February 13, 1906

AN English peeress was buried in a cheap grave in a cheap lot in the cheapest part of a humble graveyard in Chicago the other day. She was a woman of great beauty, great wit and noble family. She and her husband separated some years ago, and she left England forever to hide herself in a cheap flat in Chicago. She sent almost every bit of her income to her daughter, a noted court beauty in England to-day, and to her two sons, who are at present in Oxford College.

All of these three children are living in the greatest luxury and comfort, but they had neither time nor inclination to take the trouble to reply to the cablegrams which were sent to them announcing the death of their mother. The money she scrimped to save—aye, even went hungry to save-was good enough for them to spend. The mother who sent it to them was, so it appears, not good enough for the last tribute of a gentle word of gratitude, or even perhaps of forgiveness. 

Perhaps there was something to forgive, and perhaps there was not. I know nothing of the miserable details of this poor woman’s most miserable life, but whatever she had been or had not been, she was a devoted and self-sacrificing mother, and her reward for that devotion and self-sacrifice was ingratitude.

It takes a selfish mother to bring up unselfish children, and all of the coldhearted, ungrateful children I have ever known have been the children of mothers who oversacrificed themselves.

Whenever I see a woman dressing like a dowd to buy fine clothes for her daughter, I know before I meet the daughter just exactly the kind of girl she’ll turn out to be. Precisely the sort of girl, to be sure, that her mother has made her—vain, selfish and calculating.

How can she be anything else? Do you know a woman who lives in a little hall bedroom in a cheap boarding bouse to save money to keep her son in college? Does she wear shabby clothes, walk in the rain to save carfare, and hang over the stairs from morning until night waiting for the postman to bring her a letter from her son? Have you seen her son? Walt till he comes home for a day or two’s visit and you will see enough of him. He’ll be dressed in the very latest fashion; he won’t walk to save carfare.

Cabs are good enough for him, and he will patronize his mother and laugh at her and do everything he can to show the other boarders that he knows she’s a good little creature, and he will only spend the shortest kind of time with her that he can possibly manage.

I know a woman who works for her living. She’s a cook, and the other day she told me that she had saved enough money now to keep her daughter’s music lessons up for two years longer.

Daughter is married to a decent mechanic in decent circumstances, and she has just about as much use for music lessons as a fox terrier has for a pipe organ.

I asked my friend, the cook, why she didn’t give her daughter dressmaking lessons so she could learn to make her own clothes and help her husband save that much money, besides learning a very useful trade which would come in handy if husband died.

Every time I think of the look my friend, the cook, gave me when I asked her about the sewing lessons I hate to taste of the soup.

Fathers do very little of the spoiling; half the men in America are dragged through life helpless and protesting at the heels of some half-baked youngster whose mother has taught him that there is only one way in the world to be considered for one moment, and that is his own sweet way. If you want unselfish children, be a little bit selfish yourself; that’s the surest way in the world to get them.