my
intoxicated fancy, the attributes of a living being. To me it seemed
alive with vital warmth. It had long lain a corpse. My touch had
thrilled it as its contact now thrilled me.

With it, pressing it against my cheek, I turned toward the portiere of
the library, and as chance would have it, making a misstep when my head
was swimming, I went plunging forward into the folds of this curtain.
Because of this I found myself sitting flat upon the hardwood floor,
gibbering like an idiot at the dim light which showed the bookcases
which extended around the room from floor to ceiling.

At last, out of the haze of my befuddled mind, I saw my mother. She did
not speak; she did not cry. She had come down the stairs, and now her
face shone out of the clouds of other objects, quiet, set, as immovable
and as white as a death mask. She came near me and, taking the glove
from my hand, examined it in the manner of a prospective purchaser.

The next morning, in the midst of a horror of brilliant sunlight, she
told me the truth about my father. He had not been brave. He had not
been good.

"The glove was his," she said in her dead, cold voice. "Are you not
afraid?"

"Of what?" I asked.

"Of yourself," she whispered.

"Yes," said I. "Mortally!"

I had believed in my strength. Now a few hours had taught me the terrors
of self-fear. The ghastly story of inheritance of wild passions from
grandfather to grandfather, from father to son, pressed on my brain like
a leaden disk thrust into my skull. I had first learned the joy of
experiment with my strength; I was now to learn the pains of the ghosts
which always seemed to be mocking the assertions of my will. A line of
them, fathers and sons, pointed fingers at me and laughed. "You are
doomed," said they in matter-of-fact voices. I spent my days between
determination to indulge myself, for the very purpose of testing my
power in self-control, and the sickening relaxation of moral force that
occurs from the mere deprivation of all hope of victory in the battle.
The excuses of intemperance were never so clever as those I devised for
my own satisfaction; the bald truth, that I had taught my body
enjoyments which would never be shaken off before old age or infirmity
had placed them out of my reach, was never better known than to me.

Fortunately my mother died before the outbreak of my barbarous nature
had broken down the pride which caused me to conceal my true self from
the daylit wor