Westwards the course: Impressions of Portugal and Brazil

Mother and daughter have a clear family likeness, and much the same emotional and rhetorical temperament; but they live in different worlds. The mother can never forget her past, the leap from mediaeval modesty to leading lady on the theatre of the world, when both the Indias of spice and mine were her playthings. Since then she has had her troubles, penury even, but now en seconds noces, she has settled down to a neat bourgeois existence. But the daughter - what a wench! young as she is, she has had some lively times, but they are nothing to the future she promises herself. . . . She is sentimental about the old home, now and then, but of course it always was poky. As for what Mother thinks, naturally she is proud of her splendid if unpredictable daughter's dazzling prospects, but looks a little askance at her manners - at bottom perhaps In the little country cottage Where her aged parents live Though they drink champagne she sends them Yet they never can forgive. Most of this, after all, would apply also to Britain and the United States....