But the mother-in-law of this age is a tender mother to her daughter-in-law, contrary to what she stands accused of. She has passed through a considerable stretch of life and reached a period of contentment: jealousy has died within her, and the touch of youth has faded from her face; she does not struggle to cut herself a new path with an original costume or an attractive adornment. Add to this the native experience she has acquired as a psychological immunity with which she meets those trifling daily matters with patience and calm. The mother-in-law may indeed be a bitter foe from some other quarter, but she will never be that rival over the displays of femininity.
Often the mother-in-law's daughter takes on various faces with which she confronts you, to subdue and vex you. She visits you in the early morning not merely to sip a cup of coffee with you but to deliver you a lesson in the various arts, and she moves through the corners of your house to see whether you have bought a new lamp, or a piece of furniture, or an art picture, without her guidance. For she, as she supposes, has a right over you, and you have toward her a duty to be kept with the utmost exactness you can muster; and if she could keep watch over your words and your thoughts, she would. She justifies this right by the tie of kinship between you, and so meddles in matters that neither your sister nor your friend would trouble about.
As for the brother's wife — and she is no less a danger than the mother-in-law's daughter — she reminds you, in front of a strange visitor, of the naive or silly things you did in your girlhood, which your brother passed on to her in his moments of surrender to reminiscence: he told her, for instance, how you once boarded the train and arrived at a station other than the one you were bound for, because you took the direction opposite to the right way; or she recounts, within hearing of the company, the story of that aging gallant who was
once smitten with you — and other such empty talk that makes others laugh and fills your breast with hatred, until you wish you were able to slap her to slake your fury! And it is regrettable that the brother's wife should feel, say, her material or intellectual supe
riority over the mother-in-law's daughter, boasting and glorying if she helps her with the gift of some clothing for her children, or supports her in indispensable necessities, displaying toward her a haughtiness whose manner demolishes the other's very being,
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33 OLD BOND STREET • LONDRES 279, RUE SAINT-HONORÉ — PARIS