had it if she might, but was prevented by the biter, and the two
clamoured for it, silently, by gestures of the hands and eyes, but with
haste and passion. At this point, said my mother, her dream always
ended, and she never knew who had the apple. She fretted greatly because
of it, and was hardly recovered after I was born.

My father, who disliked all women except my mother, and, Catholic as he
was, had scant respect for the mendicant orders, hated this dream, hated
to be reminded of it, hated the name which he had been persuaded into
giving me, and, as a consequence, I believe, never loved me. For
unnumbered generations of our family we had been Antonys, Gerards,
Ralphs, Martins; the name of Francis was unknown to the tree; he never
ceased to inveigh against it, and foretold the time when it would stand
out like a parasite upon its topmost shoot. "Your Italian ecstatic," he
told my mother, "began life by running away from his father and only
came back for the purpose of robbing him. He taught more people to live
by singing hymns than ever were taught before, and preached the virtues
of poverty, by which he intended the comfort it was for the blessed poor
to be kept snugly idle by the accursed rich. It never occurred to him to
reflect that, if everybody had been of his opinion, everybody would have
starved, the world would have stood still, and neither St. Ferdinand of
Spain, nor St. Edward the Confessor, nor Don John of Austria could have
become famous. As for your women and apples, the conjunction is
detestable. Cain was the result of one woman's desire for an apple, and
the siege of Troy that of another's. I don't wish this boy to grow up
either murderer or pretty Paris."

The like of this speech, often repeated--indeed, never omitted when so I
happened to fall into some childish disgrace--may be imagined. It made
an outcast of me, an exile from my nursery days. I grew up lonely,