The story starts off with a very full description of the
mother, and it would be worth going through this again to pick out some of the answers
you are looking for. We are told that although she started out with "all the
advantages", she had "no luck". In particular, we are given key facts about her
relationship with her children, who, although are "bonny", she feels no love
for:
She had
bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could nto love them.
They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her... when her children
were present, she always felt the center of her heart go
hard.
So, she appears to be
incapable of loving and has a hardness deep within her. It is her sense of frustrated
expectations and "the grinding sense of the shortage of money" because style must be
kept up that seems to imbue the entire house with the eery
phrase:
There must be more money! There must be
more money!
This
hardness of the mother's combined with her greed causes Paul, in perhaps an attempt to
gain her affection, to try to become "lucky" and thereby gain money to please her.
However, when he wins and organises for some of the money to be given to her, note how
the mother reacts:
As his mother read it [the letter informing her
of the money], her face hardened and became more expressionless. Then a cold, determined
look came on her mouth.
Note
too how this affects the voices in the house:
Then something very curious happened. The voices
in the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring
evening.
It appears than
trying to satisy the mother's hunger for money only gives her more of a thirst for it -
she is literally consumed by her desire for more money, and how ever much she has it is
never enough. The words of her brother at the end of the story clearly state the dangers
of this. She has gained a big sum of money but has lost her son in the process. Thus the
mother clearly shows the dangers of unbridled greed.
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