It did not make it easier for him at this moment that he recognized clearly enough that the very strength in his mother which had been such security to him in his childhood was the thing now with which he had to struggle to gain his liberty⁠—that protective, maternal strength, the most formidable of all psychic forces!

She was like a witch⁠—his mother⁠—on the wrong side in the fairy-story of life. She was on the side of fate against chance, and of destiny against random fortune. “I don’t care how she feels when I tell her about Gerda,” he said to himself; and in a flash, looking all the while at his mother’s dress, he thought of the yielded loveliness of Gerda’s body, and he decided that he would shake off this resistance without the least remorse. “Shake it off! Pass over it; disregard it!” he said to himself.

“I shall come and see you, Selena, whether you like it or not,” his mother was now saying. “After twenty-five years people as old as we are ought to be sensible, oughtn’t we, Mr. Smith?” she added.