ve in comfort and try to seem glad
when he came home for his holidays.

For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not
love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made
him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and
half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not
take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for
his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at
his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were
so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank
Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get
there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep
things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less
misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window
than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was
concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end
of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes
following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her
heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was
responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to
ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as
everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which
confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving
from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city,
because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.

From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she
was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he
would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say
bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And
she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as
you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be
sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling
and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the
inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it
would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.
And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there
flashed su