up and blows off.”  But his mother—­he said she was an angel.  I recall his exact expression about her eyes that “when she looked at one it made him better.”  He spoke of her with a softening of the voice, looking often at Harriet.  He talked a good deal about his mother, trying to account for himself through her.  She was not strong, he said, and very sensitive to the contact of either friends or enemies—­evidently a nervous, high-strung woman.

“You have known such people,” he said, “everything hurt her.”

He said she “starved to death.”  She starved for affection and understanding.

One of the first things he recalled of his boyhood was his passionate love for his mother.

“I can remember,” he said, “lying awake in my bed and thinking how I would love her and serve her—­and I could see myself in all sorts of impossible places saving her from danger.  When she came to my room to bid me good night, I imagined how I should look—­for I have always been able to see myself doing things—­when I threw my arms around her neck to kiss her.”

Here he reached a strange part of his story.  I had been watching Harriet out of the corner of my eye.  At first her face was tearful with compassion, but as the Ruin proceeded it became a study in wonder and finally in outright alarm.  He said that when his mother came in to bid him good night he saw himself so plainly beforehand ("more vividly than I see you at this moment”) and felt his emotion so keenly that when his mother actually stooped to kiss him, somehow he could not respond, he could not throw his arms around her neck.  He said he often lay quiet, in waiting, trembling all over until she had gone, not only suffering himself but pitying her, because he understood how she must feel.  Then he would follow her, he said, in imagination through the long hall, seeing himself stealing behind her, just touching her hand, wistfully hoping that she might turn to him again—­and yet fearing.  He said no one knew the agonies he suffered at seeing his mother’s disappointment over his apparent coldness and unresponsiveness.

“I think,” he said, “it hastened her death.”  He would not go to the funeral; he did not dare, he said.  He cried and fought when they came to take him away, and when the house was silent he ran up to her room and buried his head in her pillows and ran in swift imagination to her funeral.  He said he could see himself in the country road, hurrying in the cold rain—­for it seemed raining—­he said he could actually feel the stones and ruts, although he could not tell how it was possible that he should have seen himself at a distance and felt in his own feet the stones of the road.  He said he saw the box taken from the wagon—­saw it—­and that he heard the sound of the clods thrown in, and it made him shriek until they came running and held him.

As he grew older he said he came to live everything beforehand, and that the event as imagined was so far more vivid and affecting that he had no heart for the reality itself.