Tanney was the butler who had taken Patrick’s place.

“If you insist,” I said coldly.  “But I shall not eat.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t understand, mother.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t?  Well, suppose I try,” she said, and sat down.  “I am not very intellagent, but if you put it clearly I may grasp it.  Perhaps you’d better speak slowly, also.”

So, sitting there in my room, while the sea throbed in tireless beats against the shore, while the light faded and the stars issued, one by one, like a rash on the Face of the sky, I told mother of my dreams.  I intended, I said, to write Life as it realy is, and not as supposed to be.

“It may in places be, ugly” I said, “but Truth is my banner.  The Truth is never ugly, because it is real.  It is, for instance, not ugly if a man is in love with the wife of another, if it is real love, and not the passing fansy of a moment.”

Mother opened her mouth, but did not say anything.

“There was a time,” I said, “when I longed for things that now have no value whatever to me.  I cared for clothes and even for the attentions of the Other Sex.  But that has passed away, mother.  I have now no thought but for my Career.”

I watched her face, and soon the dreadfull understanding came to me.  She, to, did not understand.  My literary Aspirations were as nothing to her!

Oh, the bitterness of that moment.  My mother, who had cared for me as a child, and obeyed my slightest wish, no longer understood me.  And sadest of all, there was no way out.  None.  Once, in my Youth, I had beleived that I was not the child of my parents at all, but an adopted one—­perhaps of rank and kept out of my inheritance by those who had selfish motives.  But now I knew that I had no rank or Inheritance, save what I should carve out for myself.  There was no way out.  None.

Mother rose slowly, stareing at me with perfectly fixed and glassy Eyes.

“I am absolutely sure,” she said, “that you are on the edge of somthing.  It may be tiphoid, or it may be an elopement.  But one thing is certain.  You are not normle.”

With this she left me to my Thoughts.  But she did not neglect me.  Sis came up after Dinner, and I saw mother’s fine hand in that.  Although not hungry in the usual sense of the word, I had begun to grow rather empty, and was nibling out of a box of Chocolates when Sis came.

She got very little out of me.  To one with softness and tenderness I would have told all, but Sis is not that sort.  And at last she showed her clause.

“Don’t fool yourself for a minute,” she said.  “This literary pose has not fooled anybody.  Either you’re doing it to apear Interesting, or you’ve done somthing you’re scared about.  Which is it?”

I refused to reply.

“Because if it’s the first, and you’re trying to look literary, you are going about it wrong,” she said.  “Real Literary People don’t go round mooning and talking about the ople sea.”