Perhaps comradeship ought to be stressed for a moment, viewing a tendency not quite uncommon to shelve parents, however politely, on the part of children once they imagine themselves to have become mature beings. Parental euthenasia can be practised or attempted in many and subtle ways. Sir William Osler's forty years as a limit,--of course the attribution is essentially fallacious,--fit into the notion of those children who are for an easy and if possible painless superannuation of lagging parents.
Needless to insist, comradeship means infinitely more than physical proximity. If children but knew how at last when they are grown and maturing, parents sometimes hunger for the companionship of son and daughter, these might be ready to give up some of their comrades whether first-rate or third-rate to satisfy the hunger of the parental heart for companionship with the child. True, it is, that parents must fit themselves throughout life for such comradeship, keeping their hearts young and their minds unclosed. But frequently the failure is due to the sheer selfishness of children, that selfishness which considers not nor forbears, which lightly misunderstands and unadvisedly rejects the parent as comrade on the way, though the parent-heart hunger and ache. Children should not require exhortation to the end that they remember parents are not feeders, clothiers, stewards, landlords, boarding-house keepers, and that in exceptional cases these continue to have the right to live after passing the Methuselah frontier of fifty or sixty.
One is polite in exchange of courteous word even with one's hotel clerk. Occasionally one confides in the mistress of a boarding-house. If children but knew the pain some parents feel in that attitude of children which reduces them in their own sight to the level of utterly negligible rooming-house keepers for strangers, they could not demean themselves as they do. This complaint has been voiced to me a number of times within recent years, alike by people of cultivation and by simple, untutored folk. In the former case, the filial silences are generally due to disagreements and misunderstanding. There is such a thing as the acceptance of hospitality on the part of children which compels certain reciprocal courtesies. When children for any reason are unable or unwilling to yield the elementary courtesies of the home, it is for them in all decency to decide whether they are justified in accepting its hospitality.
