This had happened all of a sudden; and no doubt Sylvie, by maliciously encouraging this warfare, was partly responsible for it. But the real cause lay deeper. This change of attitude corresponded with a change of nature, for the crisis of puberty was approaching. The child was transformed. In a few months he had assumed another character, and his rude and crotchety ways were interspersed with returns of his old taciturnity. There was nothing left of the polite, conciliatory, rather crafty silence of the child who wanted to give pleasure; one felt now something hostile and bristling in him. . . . His brusque, off-hand manner, his flagrant impoliteness, the inexplicable harshness with which he responded to affectionate advances, made Annette's sensibility bleed. Sufficiently armed against the world, she was not at all so against those whom she loved; a single rude word from her son wounded her to tears. She did not show this, but he was not unaware of it. He went on; he seemed to be seeking for things that might be unpleasant to his mother. He would have been ashamed to behave so with people for whom he cared nothing. But to her he was certainly not indifferent. He clung to her. How? Like the living fruit which, when the hour has come, breaks away from the mother's womb. He was made of her flesh, and to make this flesh his own he tore it. Marc had many elements that belonged by nature to another race than his mother's. But, strangely enough, it was not through these different elements that he most came into conflict with his mother: it was through those he had in common with her. For his jealous desire for independence was not yet in possession of a personality that properly belonged to him, and every resemblance to his mother seemed to him a sort of threat of annexation. So, to defend himself, he tried to be different. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he was the opposite. Because she was loving, he was insensible; because she was confiding, he shut himself up; because she was passionate, he was cold and cutting. And everything that she fought, everything that was repugnant to Annette's nature--ah, how well he knew these things!--became attractive to him, and he made haste to let Annette know it. Because she cared about her morality, the wilful child considered it the proper thing to regard himself as unmoral and made a point of proclaiming, "Morality is all fiction."