Gin was mother’s milk to her.

A compressed, bitterly comic metaphor: calling gin “mother’s milk” suggests a dependence so habitual it has become a kind of nourishment—something taken in daily, almost instinctively. The phrase also inverts the cultural ideal of maternal care; instead of life-giving milk, the “mother” figure is sustained (or ruined) by alcohol. In Shaw’s typical social-critical mode, the line can be read as an indictment of the conditions—poverty, despair, gendered confinement, or social hypocrisy—that normalize self-destructive coping. Its bluntness makes the judgment feel observational rather than moralizing, leaving the reader to register the tragedy beneath the wit.