to fashion. And if the
secret of them had been kept, they needn't have interfered with his smug
little folk stories Anne and her women's clubs prized so much. Had he
been actually afraid of Anne? Was he one of the men who are shamefully
under the feminine finger, subject to mother, subject to wife, without
the nerve--scarcely the wish, indeed--to break away? He was not afraid
of his mother, or, if he had been, it was the fear of hurting her who
had been so hurt already. Ever since he could remember, he saw himself,
even as a little boy, trying to get her away from his father who had a
positive cast of mind, a perfect certainty of being right and a
confirmed belief that robust measures always were the thing. If you did
wrong, you were to be punished, promptly and effectually. If you were
afraid of the dark, and came downstairs in your nightgown upon the
family sitting by the lamp, you were whaled for it, to teach you there
was something worse than bed even in the dark. If you said your head
ached and you couldn't eat bacon and greens, which father elected to
consider a normal dish, you were made to eat a lot with no matter what
dire result, because there wasn't a physical ill which couldn't be
mended by treating it robustly. He was God. He knew. And he was
perfectly well and had never once for half a minute entered into those
disordered cells of bodily ill where the atom cries to its Creator in an
anguish of bewilderment and pain. And when his body met the fate
appointed for its destruction, as all bodies must, and he was brought
home broken after the runaway that made him a thing almost too terrible
to look upon, except by eyes so full of compassion that they love the
more, Raven, then a very little John, found himself wondering how it
seemed to father now. Even runaways, father had appeared to think, could
always be governed, if you kept your head.

They never knew what he thought. He died quickly, under opiates, and
John believed his mother was so thankful for the merciful haste of it
that she could not, until long after, recall herself to mourn. And she
did honestly mourn. The little John was glad of that. So ill and tired
had she been for years and yet so bound upon the rack of her husband's
Spartan theories for her, that John thought he could not have borne it
if she had not adored her righteous tormentor, if she had had to look on
him as her master, not her lord by love. It seemed to him he was always
mourning ov