temperament or hermind was greatly occupied with private religious

solicitudes, and Iremember her talking to me but little, and that

usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own

view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my

meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from

my mother'sfaith. My reason would not permit even a remote chance

of hisbeing in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this

religion would not permit him a remote chance ofbeing out yet.

When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write

and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in

washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against

these things as indignities. But ourminds parted very soon. She

never began tounderstand the mental processes of my play, she never

interestedherself in my school life and work, she could not

understand things I said; and she came, Ithink, quite insensibly to

regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had

felt towards my father.

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not

think hedeceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness

in their union; but nodoubt he played up to her requirements in the

half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,

and presentedhimself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I

wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards

he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after

another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.

Hermind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in

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