Mothers and children are bound by a painful symmetry, at once a likeness and a fierce deadlock. The sublime extreme of a mother’s love is an inversion of the sublime extreme of children’s indifference, children who are “ever ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.” The magic of motherly love is commensurate to children’s “heartless” magic, a likeness that creates deep sympathy between them. But the mother’s magic quietly transforms the child: a mother longs to change a creature incapable of love into a person who can return love, a person no longer “gay, innocent, and heartless,” a person who can no longer fly. Motherly magic envelops children’s magic and slowly, lovingly wears it away.