icate--explanatory. Was it on the whole best to be explanatory?...

It was going to be a tremendous job, this breaking with her. And it had
begun so easily....

There was, he remembered with amazing vividness, a little hollow he had
found under her ear, and how when he kissed her there it always made her
forget her worries and ethical problems for a time and turn to him....

"No," he said grimly, "it must end," and rolled over and stared at the
black....

Like an insidious pedlar, that old rascal whom young literary gentlemen
call the Great God Pan, began to spread his wares in the young man's
memory....

After long and feverish wanderings of the mind, and some talking to
himself and walking about the room, he did at last get a little away
from Mrs. Skelmersdale.

He perceived that when he came to tell his mother about this journey
around the world there would be great difficulties. She would object
very strongly, and if that did not do then she would become extremely
abusive, compare him to his father, cry bitterly, and banish him
suddenly and heartbrokenly from her presence for ever. She had done that
twice already--once about going to the opera instead of listening to
a lecture on Indian ethnology and once about a week-end in Kent.... He
hated hurting his mother, and he was beginning to know now how easily
she was hurt. It is an abominable thing to hurt one's mother--whether
one has a justification or whether one hasn't.

Recoiling from this, he was at once resumed by Mrs. Skelmersdale. Who
had in fact an effect of really never having been out of the room. But
now he became penitent about her. His penitence expanded until it was on
a nightmare scale. At last it blotted out the heavens. He felt like one
of those unfortunate victims of religious mania who are convinced they
have committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. (Why had he gone there
to lunch? That was the key to it. WHY had he gone there to lunch?)... He
began to have remorse for everything, for everything he had ever done,
for everything he had ever not done, for everything in the world. In a
moment of lucidity he even had remorse for drinking that stout honest
cup of black coffee....

And so on and so on and so on....

When daylight came it found Benham still wide awake. Things crept
mournfully out of the darkness into a reproachful clearness. The sound
of birds that had been so delightful on the yesterday was now no longer
agreeable. The thrushe