ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I
imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving
birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have
foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long
time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the
child." Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have
been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the
sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and
which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their
echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and
more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent
bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the
streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until
they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so
deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents
gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the reward
of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this
crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat
arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him and
due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance
expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps even what I
called his strictness, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that title
less, really, than my mother's or grandmother's attitude, for his nature,
which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own, had probably
prevented him from guessing, until then, how wretched I was every evening,
a thing which my mother and grandmother knew well; but they loved me
enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering, which they hoped to
teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to