“He shirked everything,” his mother went on. “He lapped up the cream of those silly women’s love like a leering cat. He laughed at people who did anything in life. He wasn’t afraid of being broken, because there wasn’t anything in him hard enough to break. He oozed and seeped into women’s hearts like bad water into leaky pipes. And he justified himself all the time. He never said, ‘This is outrageous, but I’m going to do it.’ He said⁠—” But at this point Wolf began wondering why his mother kept her window shut when the wind was in the east.

“East wind is different from all other winds,” he thought. “Something to do with the roll of the earth, I suppose.” And he imagined his soul shooting like a projectile out of that closed window⁠—shooting, whizzing, darting against the sharp wind, till it reached the wind’s home. And he visualized the wind’s home as a promontory like St. Alban’s Head. But his mother was still going on abusing his father. “How she must have loved him,” he thought, “to hate him like this after twenty-five years!”