er his mother, in those days, always lying awake and
wondering if she were awake, too, always trying to save her from some
task too heavy for her and too heavy for him also, so that, if she were
to be saved, it had to be by stratagem. But stratagem was difficult in
that house, because his older sister, who became Dick's mother, was of
her father's temperament, always perfectly well and also an inferior god
who knew at every point what to do, and she had not merely imbibed
father's certainty that the only thing mother needed was to take a
brace: she had it by nature. And when, father being gone to heaven--and
John, young John now, not little any more, made no doubt he had gone, it
pleased mother so to say it and be obligingly agreed with--Amelia, his
sister, took her departure, on the night of her marriage with a very
prosperous Mr. Powell, for the middle west, John Raven, then beginning
his apprenticeship to wool, danced a fantastic fling in the sitting-room
where the wedding gifts still lay displayed and whooped with emotion at
last let loose. His mother, in the gray silk and commendable lace Amelia
had selected and he had paid for, did smile unwillingly, but she spoke
to him in the reproving tone which was the limit of severity his boyhood
had known from her and which he had learned, in those earliest days,
meant nothing at all:

"I'd be ashamed! Any one would think you were glad your sister had
gone!"

John did not say he was glad. He knew too much to stir up loyal
reactions in mother's conscience. He simply wove a dance of intricate
mazes about her, as she sat in her chair, and his inner mind was one
paean of thanksgiving to God, not the spurious gods who had been his
father and sister, but the mysterious Deity who had, for obscure
purposes, called them into being, because now John had at last full
swing and could let mother out of bondage. What difference did it make
that he wasn't trekking through darkest Africa or being hunted by the
jungle in India, so long as mother was out of bondage? He even took his
allegiance to Anne rather lightly, those first years, he was so
absent-minded about everything but hypnotising mother into thinking she
was going to be very happy and live a long time doing it. And that was
the part of his life when there seemed to be a great deal of it, and if
he didn't have a thing now there would be plenty of chances to snatch at
it later. He had simply been eaten up, the energy of him, the w