ttie. 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 universal
tendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to work
loosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, came
from the young--the crude unmerciful young. It seemed in those
days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being--that either we must
submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them,
thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before we
too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.

My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own
silent meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared
no other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed,
part of the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not
think then that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or
children honor their parents and still think for themselves. We were
angry and hasty because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned
and vitiated air. That deliberate animation of the intelligence
which is now the universal quality, that vigor with co