her tiresome realities and
become a creature of dreams. She grew tall and beautiful. He liked to
be alone--best of all at night when Christine had put the light out--so
that he could make up stories about her and himself and their new
mystical intimacy. He knew that she was dead but he did not believe
it. It was just one of those mysterious tricks which grown-up people
played on children to pretend that death was so enormously conclusive.
Though he had buried the black kitten with his own hands in the back
garden, and had felt the stiffness of its pitiful body and the dank
chill of its once glossy fur, he was calmly sure that somewhere or
other, out of sight, it still pursued its own tail with all the
solemnity of kittenhood.

One of these nights the door would open and his mother would be there.
In this dream of her she appeared to him much as she had done once in
Kensington High Street when he had wilfully strayed from her side and
lost himself, and, being overwhelmed with the sense of his smallness
and forlornness, had burst into a howl of grief. Then suddenly she had
stood out from the midst of the sympathetic crowd--remote, stern and
wonderful--and he had flung himself on her, knowing that whatever she
might do to him, she loved him and that they belonged to one another,
inextricably and for all time.

So she stood on the threshold of his darkened room, and at that vision
his adoration became an agony and he lay with his face hidden in his
arms, waiting for the touch of her hand that never came, until he slept.

Christine became his mother. Every morning at nine o'clock she turned
the key of the pretentious mansion where James Stonehouse had set up
practice for the twentieth time in his career, and called out, "Hallo,
Robert!" in her clear, cool voice, and Robert, standing at the top of
the stairs in his night-shirt, called back, "Hallo, Christine!" very
joyously because he knew it annoyed Edith, his father's new wife,
listening jealously from behind her bedroom door.

And then Christine scrubbed his ears, and sometimes, when there were no
servants, a circumstance which coincided exactly with a periodical
financial crisis, she scrubbed the floors. Robert's first hatred had
changed rapidly to the love he would have given his mother had she
lived. There was no romance about it. Christine was not omnipotent as
his mother had become. He knew that she, too, was often terribly
unhappy, and their helplessnes