given, or rather conveyed, being that
he had had and still was having a mother. Which he was never to forget.
In hours of temptation. In hours of danger. Mr. Twist, with his virginal
white mind, used to wonder when the hours of temptation and of danger
would begin, and rather wish, in the elegant leisure of his
half-holidays, that they soon would so that he might show how determined
he was to avoid them.

For the ten years from his father's death till he went to Harvard, he
lived with his mother and sister and was their assiduous attendant. His
mother took the loss of his father badly. She didn't get over it, as
widows sometimes do, and grow suddenly ten years younger. The sight of
her, so black and broken, of so daily recurring a patience, of such
frequent deliberate brightening for the sake of her children, kept Mr.
Twist, as he grew up, from those thoughts which sometimes occur to young
men and have to do with curves and dimples. He was too much absorbed by
his mother to think on such lines. He was flooded with reverence and
pity. Through her, all women were holy to him. They were all mothers,
either actual or to be--after, of course, the proper ceremonies. They
were all people for whom one leapt up and opened doors, placed chairs
out of draughts, and fetched black shawls. On warm spring days, when he
was about eighteen, he told himself earnestly that it would be a
profanity, a terrible secret sinning, to think amorously--yes, he
supposed the word was amorously--while there under his eyes, pervading
his days from breakfast to bedtime, was that mourning womanhood, that
lopped life, that example of brave doing without any hope or expectation
except what might be expected or hoped from heaven. His mother was
wonderful the way she bore things. There she was, with nothing left to
look forward to in the way of pleasures except the resurrection, yet
she did not complain.

But after he had been at Harvard a year a change came over Mr. Twist.
Not that he did not remain dutiful and affectionate, but he perceived
that it was possible to peep round the corners of his mother, the
rock-like corners that had so long jutted out between him and the view,
and on the other side there seemed to be quite a lot of interesting
things going on. He continued, however, only to eye most of them from
afar, and the nearest he got to temptation while at Harvard was to read
"Madame Bovary."

After Harvard he was put into an engineering firm, f