d that by the time
you were a man fully grown and emerging from the passionately tumultuous
openings of manhood, capable of forgiving me all my blundering
parentage, capable of perceiving all the justifying fine intention of my
ill-conceived disciplines and misdirections, I might be either an old
man, shriveling again to an inexplicable egotism, or dead. I saw myself
as I had seen my father--first enfeebled and then inaccessibly tranquil.
When presently you had gone from my study, I went to my writing-desk and
drew a paper pad towards me, and sat thinking and making idle marks upon
it with my pen. I wanted to exceed the limits of those frozen silences
that must come at last between us, write a book that should lie in your
world like a seed, and at last, as your own being ripened, flower into
living understanding by your side.

This book, which before had been only an idea for a book, competing
against many other ideas and the demands of that toilsome work for
peace and understanding to which I have devoted the daily energies of my
life, had become, I felt, an imperative necessity between us.

Sec. 3

And then there happened one of those crises of dread and apprehension
and pain that are like a ploughing of the heart. It was brought home to
me that you might die even before the first pages of this book of yours
were written. You became feverish, complained of that queer pain you had
felt twice before, and for the third time you were ill with
appendicitis. Your mother and I came and regarded your touzled head and
flushed little face on the pillow as you slept uneasily, and decided
that we must take no more risks with you. So soon as your temperature
had fallen again we set about the business of an operation.

We told each other that nowadays these operations were as safe as going
to sleep in your bed, but we knew better. Our own doctor had lost his
son. "That," we said, "was different." But we knew well enough in our
hearts that you were going very near to the edge of death, nearer than
you had ever been since first you came clucking into the world.

The operation was done at home. A capable, fair-complexioned nurse took
possession of us; and my study, because it has the best light, was
transfigured into an admirable operating-room. All its furnishings were
sent away, every cloth and curtain, and the walls and floor were covered
with white sterilized sheets. The high little mechanical table they
erected before the