“You are making of him a hermit, a recluse, a solitary and distorted young man,” she said. Her voice was like the lash of a whip. “You have poisoned his mind, and you will permanently poison his peace and happiness. Everything that would shame him you have told him; without knowing what it is you have told him, I have sensed that. And this has been going on for years. You have forbidden him to associate with other boys and other young men. The sunlight of companionship you have shut away from him. Here in this desolate house, shrouded in these wintry evergreens, in the dark, in the damp, in the company of a sick woman and an old man full of years and past evil, you have kept him and tried to form him. If he is not wholly misshapen it is through no omission of yours. It must stop!” She was thinking to herself, in her rage, that of all madnesses a monomania was the most terrible to contend with. She was in no doubt as to the form of his malady. He was obsessed by a notion of saving Guy from the snare of the world’s wickedness into which he himself had fallen, into which he had seen so many men fall. He had seen the trap spring and close on himself and others. Not many had ever escaped it; those who had were mutilated for life. There had been this mutilation in his own life. He would not trust the boy to walk warily, he would not trust himself to teach him to avoid the snare. He would keep him where he could not walk into it if he had to seal him in a living tomb to accomplish his purpose. With many a boy the undertaking would have been a preposterous impossibility. With a sensitive youth of a poetic and dreamy temperament, under absolute control from earliest childhood, the thing was feasible; more, it was being done. Mermaid recalled with a sense of pitiful compunction Guy’s strange eyes with their wild animal look, the most characteristic thing about him. But at least then, in his teens, he had held up his head, and looked about him. Now.... She had passed him on the street twice and he had not even seen her. She had spoken to him once and he had hardly been articulate in his reply; had seemed to hate and distrust her, not as Mermaid, not as a woman, but as a person of his own kind. She came back to a consciousness of what Guy’s father, after an interval of silence, was saying: “... I have told him only the truth.” “The truth! You have not told him the truth, nor shown him the truth. What you have told him is worse than a lie. For a lie is like certain substances which are poisonous only in large doses. Strychnine, for example. Tiny quantities, a nerve tonic; larger quantities, convulsions and death. But a little truth is a deadly poison, always. And the only antidote is more truth and more and more! There cannot be too much of it; but you have never given him anything but the truth of two or three persons out of the millions of men and women that dwell on earth.”