alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I
wrote or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I
could contrive.

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and
uneventful place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative
temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious
solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that
usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own
view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my
meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from
my mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote chance
of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this
religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.
When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write
and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in
washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against
these things as indignities. But our minds parted very soon. She
never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never
interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had
felt towards my father.

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not
think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness
in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the
half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,
and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I
wonder why nearly all love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards