Explore "A Treatise on Parents and Children" by George Bernard Shaw on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in / France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should / say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the / seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seem / to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is really / suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England has / not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless and / unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call / family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family / needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it / that could not be amputated with advantage.