He could visualize now, as if it had occurred that very day instead of two months ago, the outraged anger upon his mother’s face, when he communicated to her what had happened. He had danced his “malice-dance”⁠—that is how he himself expressed it⁠—in the middle of an innocent discourse on the reign of Queen Anne. He was telling his pupils quite quietly about Dean Swift; and all of a sudden some mental screen or lid or dam in his own mind completely collapsed and he found himself pouring forth a torrent of wild, indecent invectives upon every aspect of modern civilization.

He had, in fact, so at least he told his mother, danced his “malice-dance” on that quiet platform to so abandoned a tune, that no “authorities,” in so far as they retained their natural instincts at all, could possibly condone it.

And now, with that event behind him, he was escaping from the weight of maternal disapproval into the very region where the grand disaster of his mother’s life had occurred.