resentments that filled me with bitterness against all she held sacred.  Yet, you know, it was not her dear gods she sought to defend so much as me!  She seemed always to be wanting to say to me, “Dear, I know it’s hard—­but revolt is harder.  Don’t make war on it, dear—­don’t!  Don’t do anything to offend it.  I’m sure it will hurt you if you do—­it will hurt you if you do.”

She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing.  The existing order dominated her into a worship of abject observances.  It had bent her, aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five she peered through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only dimly, filled her with a habit of anxiety, made her hands------ Her poor dear hands!  Not in the whole world now could you find a woman with hands so grimy, so needle-worn, so misshapen by toil, so chapped and coarsened, so evilly entreated. . . .  At any rate, there is this I can say for myself, that my bitterness against the world and fortune was for her sake as well as for my own.

Yet that night I pushed by her harshly.  I answered her curtly, left her concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my door upon her.

And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life, at the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie’s letter, at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found intolerable, and the things I could not mend.  Over and over went my poor little brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill of troubles.  Nettie.  Rawdon.  My mother.  Gabbitas.  Nettie. . .

Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion.  Some clock was striking midnight.  After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions.  I remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very quickly in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before I was asleep.

But how my mother slept that night I do not know.

Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to Parload.  I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of the sort was to be escaped under those former conditions.  In that time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or so of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application to some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in them.  They set and hardened into narrow ways.  Few women remained capable of a new idea after five and twenty, few men after thirty-one or two.  Discontent with the thing that existed was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, and the only protest against it, the only effort against that