d. In time, the weight of any important
decision gave him acute, unendurable agony of mind. Called upon to
decide for himself a matter of import, his thought would become
confused, his brain torpid, and in tears and perplexity the tormented
lad would throw himself into the arms of his anxious parents and beg
to be told what course to pursue.

Thus his nature grew to depend upon something stronger than itself to
twine about. He sought it in his schoolmates; but they misread him.
The little acts which were due to his keen sensitiveness or to his
exaggerated reticence of disposition were frequently interpreted by
them as affronts, and he was generally left out of their games, or
avoided entirely. His playmates consequently became fewer and more
transient as the years gained upon him, until at length, trodden upon,
but unable to turn, he withdrew his love from the world and bestowed
it all upon his anxious mother. She became his only intimate, and from
her alone he sought the affection for which he yearned with an
intensity that he could not express. Shunning the boisterous,
frolicking children at the close of the school day, he would seek her,
and, nestling at her side, her hand clasped in his, would beg her to
talk to him of the things with which his childish thought was
struggling. These were many, but they revolved about a common
center--religion.

The salient characteristics already mentioned were associated with
others, equally prominent, and no less influential in the shaping of
his subsequent career. With the development of his deep, inward
earnestness there had appeared indications of latent powers of mind
that were more than ordinary. These took the form of childish
precocity in his studies, clearness of spiritual vision, and
maturity in his conduct and mode of life. The stunting of his
physical nature threw into greater prominence his exaggerated
soul-qualities, his tenderness, his morbid conscientiousness, and a
profound emotionalism which, at the sight of a great painting, or
the roll of the Cathedral organ, would flood his eyes and fill his
throat with sobs. When the reckless founder of the family experienced
a reversal of his own dark traits of soul, nearly three centuries
before, it was as if the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite
direction, and at the extreme point of its arc had left the little
Jose, with the sterner qualities of the old _Conquistador_ wholly
neutralized by self-condemnation, fe