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Show I, j ' Dorothy Dix Talks ' j 1 A TOO OPTIMISTIC INVENTORY j By DOROTHY DLX, the World's Highest Paid Woman Writer ! ' It Is. of course, one of the merciful, dispensations of Proidence that every, old -hen thinks that she has hatched! 1 out a swan, and that every mother be-j i lieves her own children to be models 1 I of beauty and paragons of wit and in telligence. Otherwise there would be no chil- f 1 drcn raised. It is only a mother's j 'I blindness to its defects that gives a woman the patience and the love to worry and work with a cross, fretful, y sickly, teething baby that doesn't look tt as if it were more than three jumps ahead of its original monkey ances tors. Nobody else could possibly think it worth rearing, but the blessed 1 - ' mother delusion sees the beauty of Lilian Russell or a Paul Swan in the watery eyes, the pudgy noso and the' mouth like a catfish;' the mother's ears hear the voice of Caruso in every squall, and detects the intellect of a "Woodrow "Wilson in the countenance that has no more expression to it than a cream cheese. 'Mother Love is Great. None of us know whether to laugh I at the stultification of mother love1 that we are so often called upon to wit-1 ness, or to go down on our knees in j I reverence before a love so great that ' it robs an otherwise intelligent woman of every particle of ability to see i clearly, or to form a true judgment where the beloved one is concerned.' 1 for mother love is that which when i put into the heart of a woman robs lier of her reason. So when omo woman descants to I us by the hour about the beauty and the charms of her daughter, and wo A., find the girl homely and awkward and unattractive, with no charm of mind or person; or when mother shows oil' Utile Tommy's marvelous histrionic i"V. r ability -and makes him recite for U3, 'ft' and he writhes, and twists, and j' squirms, and mumbles out some hack neyed verses with about as much expression ex-pression and elocutional effect as if j they wore being ground out of a food chopper. Or, when mother shows us little , Mary's composition and tells us that j the is sure that Mary is going to be rii author because she already dis plays such a genius for writing; and we can see in Mary's effort nothing 1 but commonplace childish twaddle, 111- ! expressed and badly spelled, wny I there arc tears very near our smiles, j ( and we thank God f3r mothers, which j , ! gives each of us one person 'who be lieves in our genius and thinks us n paragon of beauty, no matter how , much the world may differ from her. w ad Many Square Pegs In Ttound Holo. ji'jj Comforting, sustaining and soothing IITa as thia mother love Js to our vanity, IN M however, there is no doubt that tne UrW mother obsession which renders it im- n J Possible for a mother to ever see hir llyjM I children as they really are, and form mflW ! a true estimate of their abilities, is Mia & on of tho main reasons why there arc 1 Jl 5 so many square pegs In round holes, i'U aad why HO manJ' Poople arc unsuc- I j -ccssful in life, Urnf A vcry Prominent business man said ,J fk not IonS ago that one of the principal jSSfc causes of bankruptcy among mer- chants was that they made a too optimistic op-timistic inventory of their assets. They overvalued the goods on their shclv.es, and put a higher price than they would fetch on their wares. That's the troublo with mothers. Their love makes them see the children chil-dren as dazzling geniuses, and world winders instead of the ungiftcd, mediocre medi-ocre individuals they are, and so instead in-stead of fitting them to fill worthily the humble sphere in life to which heaven has called them, mother unfits them to make a living by trying to force them into some high place for which nature never designed them, i Sally, for instance, has carroty hair, a saleratus biscuit complexion and a dumpy figure. She dances like a bale of hay, and has the conversational nimbleness of a performing elephant, but she is strong, healthy, energetic and' capable, and has plenty of good hard horse sense. If mother could see Sally as she is, she would know that Sally's chances of happiness in life lay in her becoming becom-ing a business woman, or marrying some sensible, practical man who puts more stress 011 a wife's cooking than on her looks. But mother sees Sally as a radiant creature born to shine in ; society, and so she piles fine clothes . on her and hawks her around ihe mar-! mar-! riagc market and breaks her heart with chagrin, wondering why other girls have beaus and Sally has none. Horn's a good, honest, industrious lad, who would make a steady.' plugging plug-ging clerk, who would work hard and eventually save up enough money to start a little corner grocery of his own. But mother hears in his halting . speech the eloquence of an orator, and she forces him into the'law, where he I starves. " A famous nlicnist told me once that I It was a mother's Inability to. see in I '' child any defect that was responsible respon-sible for an enormous amount of feeblemindedness. He said that It competent physicians could treat the children who are under par mentally, while tUcy are still very young, thousands thou-sands upon thousands of them could be cured, or at least helped. But the mother love kept the mothers moth-ers even from admitting 10 themselves that there was anything the matter with their children. They would say that their babies were backward" In learning to walk or talk; or that they were "delicate." or so "sensitive." ana so cover up the mental defect until it was too late to save the child from the moat cruel fate on earth. It is the same mother blindness which refuses to see in a child any blemish which keeps mothers from helping their children to correct their faults Mothers know that any other children who are permitted to grow up wild and uncontrolled will inevitably inevit-ably grow into the kind of men and women who make undesirable citizens citi-zens and defy law and order. She knows that- a child who is never taught to govern its temper dovolops into tho man or woman who is a fall-This fall-This is v what turns mother love, which should be the greatest blessing that can cpme to a child, often into a the greatest curse that can befajl it. ure in life and brings sorrow to all j with whom ho or she comes in con- i tact. : But mother cannot save her children chil-dren from their weaknesses because she sees In , their uncontrolled outbursts out-bursts only hizh spirits and ca'mou- ( flages their rages as rierves. |