“Mother, I am chafing myself to death against the limitations of this narrow life.”

“My son,” she said calmly, “this has not come to me as a surprise.”

He moved uneasily and looked as if he would ask her “Why?”

“Because,” she said, as if he had really spoken, “a mother possesses the power of divination, and can discern the sorrows of her children, by a suffering in her own bosom.”

The consciousness that he had caused her pain rendered him incapable of speech, and for a moment they sat in silence.

“What is thy wish and purpose, my son?” she asked at last, with an effort which seemed to exhaust her strength.

“I wish to see the world,” he answered, his eye kindling as he spoke.

This reply, foreseen and expected as it was, sent a shiver through her.  She turned paler, if possible, than before; but summoning all the powers of self-control resident in that disciplined spirit, she replied with an enforced tranquillity: 

“My son, does thee know what this world is which thee fain would see?”

“I have seen it in my dreams.  I have heard its distant voices calling to me.  My spirit chafes to answer their summons.  I strain at my anchor like a great ship caught by the tide.”

“Shall I tell thee what this world of which thee has dreamed such dreams is really like, my son?” she asked, struggling to maintain her calm.

“How should thee know?”

“I have seen it.”

“Thee has seen it?  I thought that thee had passed thy entire life among the Quakers,” he answered with surprise.

“I say that I have seen it.  Shall I tell thee what it is?” she resumed, as if she had not heard him.

“If thee will,” he answered, awed by a strange solemnity in her manner.

Her quick respirations had become audible.  Small but intensely red spots were burning on either cheek.  Her white hands trembled as they clutched the arms of the old rocking chair in which she sat.

“I will!” she said, regarding him with a look which seemed to devour him with yearning love.  “This world whose voices thee hears calling is a fiction of thine own brain.  That which thee thinks thee beholds of glory and beauty thee hast conjured up from the depths of a youthful and disordered fancy, and projected into an unreal realm.  That world which thee has thus beheld in thy dreams will burst like a pin-pricked bubble when thee tries to enter it.  It is not the real world, my son.  How shall I tell thee what that real world is?  It is a snare, a pit-fall.  It is a flame into which young moths are ever plunging.  It promises, only to deceive; it beckons, only to betray; its smiles are ambushes; it is sunlight on the surface, but ice at the heart; it offers life, but it confers death.  I bid thee fear it, shun it, hate it!”

She leaned far forward in her chair, and her face upon which the youth had never seen any other look but that of an almost unearthly calm, was glowing with excitement and passion.