urt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions
of expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me
at all--and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion,
her only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted
order--to laws, to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all
respectable persons in authority over us, and with her to believe
was to fear. She knew from a thousand little signs--though still at
times I went to church with her--that I was passing out of touch of
all these things that ruled her life, into some terrible unknown.
From things I said she could infer such clumsy concealments as I
made. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revolt against the
accepted order, felt the impotent 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. Ne