me facts. He was very
small for his age and hopelessly tied to the apron strings of his mother
in spite of all his father's efforts to pry him loose. The reason for
this failure was that his father lacked the time or the capacity for
winning the boy's whole-hearted attention and affection.

The one thing the father seemed to care for on his return home was to be
left alone with his own preoccupations, and these did not include the
boy. He could not unbend. He could not subordinate his own momentary
desire or disinclination to an interest essentially foreign to his own
self. In other words, he was just as self-centred as Keith, and just as
unreflecting on the whole. Both lived completely in the present, and
both wished to escape from it. The only difference between them was that
while Keith sought his escape in space, so to speak, by means of his
books, the father's only road of escape led him into a past of which the
boy formed no part.

Either through some fault of his own nature, or through the restrictive
policy of his parents, Keith at nine had formed no real attachments
outside of his immediate surroundings, and no life of his own that was
not enclosed by the walls of his childhood home. This state of affairs
tended always to throw him back on the mother as his most satisfactory
source of inspiration and the magnetic pole of his emotional compass.
And she on her part left no effort untried that could help to fasten his
affections more closely to her.

Unconsciously but increasingly she worked to cut the boy off from all
the rest of the world in order that she might have him the more
exclusively to herself. She expressed openly the wish that he might be a
girl, because girls in those days were so much less likely to escape the
parental protection.

The boy was pleased by her attempts at monopolization. There was
something flattering and softly reassuring about her passionate pleas
for the uppermost place in his heart. And yet he rebelled with
increasing violence against the closeness of her clutch on him. He
seemed to choke at times, and a blind hatred rose within him without
ever revealing itself as in any way related to his mother. One of the
dominant emotions of this and the following period of his life was one
of intense impatience that seemed to be directed toward no particular
object. Once in a great while he turned toward his father with an
expectation of relief, but this expectation was always foiled, an