Tom repeated his father’s words as his father spoke them. “My mother is gone, I bless You and thank You, God. She is gone, and I am alone without a mother. God, I thank You. She is gone to join the Chosen in Your presence. God, I thank You. My mother is gone--perhaps--to be damned in Hell. God, I bless You and thank You.” Curtin Rennard took the child high in his arms: gazed into his frightened eyes: seemed pleased thereat, for he embraced him. Tom was happy then. He did not miss his mother. He never missed her. All his will was fixed on the pain-dealing, passionate parent. His rival--his rival-self--his mother was no more there. He was more free to love, to suffer, to rebel, now that the great sick lover, the great sufferer, the unsucceeding rebel with her wide skirts and her clear wan forehead was gone from their world. A deep and subtle relationship grew between the tremorous child and the thwarting, thwarted, powerful man, his father. A relationship unmeasured and un-named in the peripheral vicissitudes of their ages and their minds. An eye unchecked by surfaces and the color of habit, drawn to the womb of life, must have found Tom’s love for his father in those days deeply atune with the love of his father’s wife who was dead: must have seen the bereaved love of Curtin Rennard astir for a new replenishment in all his children. So deep a dream could not grow unchallenged in one as quick with reality as Tom. He rebelled. His nature munitioned itself for rebellion. There was Cornelia. She saved herself from her father by making into an ideal her dim devotion to her mother. Tom took her as ally. Cornelia imaged her saving devotion in maternal deeds, she imaged it in clay. Her mother was sanctuary from the common danger. In Tom grew great love for his protecting sister: above all tense self-abandonment to his father’s greatest rival, the real world. Here lay freedom for Tom! His blood knew that the hidden love must scorch and shrivel in the sun. He courted the sun. He was in perpetual revolt against his father’s hold on his emotions: against his father’s closeted ideals: against the source of his father’s hold, his own deep identity with his mother. Hence, Tom’s distrust of women, his devotion to Cornelia, the frenzied scatter of his forces in objective life. During Tom’s boyhood, he was almost a woman in his attitude toward women: in each of them he fought his mother, fought her betrayal of him--as of herself--to his dominant father. His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he needed freedom. Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love with imagery, with color, with the Symbol--the artist in Tom grew. From his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat.