long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have
perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have
arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days
I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of
comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able
to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be
possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if
I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to
control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found
myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is
only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that
I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively
drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would
suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again
through the silent evening air.

Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so
deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents
gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the
reward of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in
this crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat
arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him
and due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance
expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps even what
I called his strictness, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that
title less, really, than my mother's or grandmother's attitude, for his
nature, which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own,
had probably prevented him from guessing, until then, how wretched I was
every evening, a thing which my mother and grandmother knew well; but
they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering,
which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous
sensibility and to strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection
for me was of another kind, I doubt if he would have shewn so much
courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he
had said to my mother: "Go and comfort him." Mamma stayed all night in
my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination
those hours, so different from anything that I had had a ri