Yet she resented Dudley's attitude toward her slight attempts at self-expression. It reminded her of Laurence's protective air when she first took a position under him at the laboratory. It was part of the conspiracy against her attempt at achieving significance beyond the limits of her personal problem. It hurt her as much as it pleased her when either Dudley or her husband complimented her dress or commented on the grace of her hands when she was pouring tea. Her feeling was the same when she thought of having a child. She wanted the child in everything but the sense of accepting the inevitable in maternity. She sometimes imagined that if she could bear a child that was hers alone she could be glad of it. In order to avoid being stifled by a conviction of inferiority, she was constantly demanding some assurance of dependence on her from those she was associated with. * * * * * Since childhood Dudley Allen had looked to himself to achieve greatness. He had been a pretty child, but effeminate, undersized, and not noted for cleverness. His father was a Unitarian minister in a New England town; his mother, an ambitious woman absorbed in the pursuit of culture. Her esthetic conceptions were of an intellectual order, but she sang in the choir of her husband's church and thought of herself as frustrated in the expression of a naturally artistic temperament. Dudley remembered her with vexation. She had been ambitious for him, and he had resented her efforts to use him for vicarious self-fulfilment. She had him taught to play the violin and developed his taste for music. It was chiefly in contradiction to her suggestions that he early interested himself in paint. Now he played the violin occasionally, but never in public. His father was a man repressed and made severe by his sense of justice. As a child Dudley knew that this parent was ashamed of his son's physical weakness and emotional explosiveness. His father wanted him to be a lawyer. His mother wished him to become a man of letters or a musician of distinction. Dudley was reared in the sterile atmosphere of a religion which confined itself to ethical adherences. However, he absorbed Biblical lore and adapted it to his more poetic needs. His father's contempt pained him, but in no wise diminished the boy's vaguely acquired conviction that he was himself one of the chosen few. Dudley identified himself with the singers of Israel who spoke with God. As he was unable to cope with bullying playmates of his own age, his exalted isolation was his defense. When he was twelve years old his mother discovered a journal in which he had set down some of his intimacies with the Creator. She admonished him for his absurdities and burned the book. The incident helped to develop his resistance to the opinions of those who would destroy his consoling fancies. He noted precociously symptoms of his mother's weaknesses.