Tom looked up as if stung. “What do you mean?” “Oh, nothing extraordinary, Tom. I am convinced that folks who strike a bargain with the Devil do so, not for specific gain, but because they like his company.” Tom glowed at her with a cold smile of admiration. “Splendid!... What does it mean?” Cornelia’s sharp shoulders shrugged. “I suppose I like Mrs. Duffield’s parties?” “I am sure of it,” she snapped. Then, quietly, like a mother to her son, “So stop protesting, like a dear man. Yes?” It was true. Tom knew it, however, as well as his wise sister. She understood with a great clarity only a part of Tom. She did not know how, in these protestations, he pleaded against himself, not with her. There was a depth in Tom more cold to these mundane blandishments than the surface was warm to them. Tom’s conflict was deeper than the desire to conceal from himself and from his sister this worldliness which guided him about. It was a conflict rooted in his nature. There was a part of Tom that despised his conduct, hated his success, rose forever like a gaunt, uninvited guest to spoil his banquet. A ghost in Tom that was very much alive.... It was born perhaps near the hour of Tom’s birth in Dahlton. A very looming part of the world of Tom was this father whom his mother loved. His father was there. He needed to be taken. He needed to be taken as his mother took him. At the beginning, the bar between the mother and her child has no reality to the child. Mother and child are one to the child’s rapt omniscience. The tall, gray-faced man had nervous hard hands which were strong. Often his hands viced the woman’s arms till she screamed: they screwed her to a chair while his words lashed her: they turned her about to the door she was ordered to pass through. Then, in that dawn of the world, those hands left the mother who was cowed; they took the passionate sprawling flesh of Tom and thrust him to his crib, they turned him about so that Tom’s eyes gazed at a blank wall whose denial of sight was terror. Mrs. Rennard loved Tom’s father. Her senses had mostly pain of him, but passion also. Since her senses loved him, they needed to love what her husband gave them. Tom, feeling in these dim passionate days the aching presence of his father upon his world--upon his mother and upon himself--the visitation of his cruelty upon them--took him as did his mother. He shared his mother’s sensuous satisfaction in abject pain. Like her he made joy of anguish: like her, molded himself to love and to depend upon this man as the pain-giver, since such was the form of his love, such the burden of his support. Mrs. Rennard loved her husband, her senses took him. Tom looked upon his father with his mother’s senses. His mother died. Curtin Rennard went to the child. He lifted him in his arms. “Thomas,” he said, “you are to be a motherless child. Your mother is dead. I want you to pray with me to God--to thank Him for the cruel thing that He has brought upon us.”