"Loves me? That is good! Why, she has bled me since I was seven years old. She has sometimes kept me at my violin until I have fainted from exhaustion. She has purposely isolated me from all friends and interests so that I might have no outside influences to distract me. Because of her, my life has been as narrow and as bleak as that of a Trappist Monk. We have never had any home, any ties. We have traveled from city to city, like a couple of strolling players, and lived almost as poorly, although ever since my twelfth year I have brought in thousands. But she wanted to hoard. It is her passion. She's very greedy. In fact, she's insatiable. She has always insisted upon being my business manager, and it wasn't until a couple of years ago when I was twenty-one that I was allowed the use of some of my own money. And then it was only because the doctors frightened her!" Anne met the triumph in his eyes with an inward shiver. "Were you so ill?" she inquired, curiosity struggling with repugnance. "No, but I was so damned neurotic and unsociable and had acquired so many complexes that they were afraid I would develop dementia praecox if my chains weren't slackened up a bit." "Poor boy, what happened then?" Anne seated herself on the foot of his bed and prepared to listen to the end. Very possibly, mental catharsis might succeed where the rest-cure had failed. He continued vehemently. "What happened? I took a three months' vacation from my music, which I had begun to detest in a furtive, unacknowledged, sort of way, and for a time ran completely wild. I was like an animal let out of a cage. I ran around with a pack of fools who took me into every sort of imaginable den and got me into every kind of imaginable scrape. In fact, it was only the force of money and my mother's constant watchfulness which kept me out of the newspapers at least a dozen times." "But--but didn't she try to interfere? To reason with you?" Anne was remotely angry at herself for being offended by this recital. His laugh was sinister. The expression on his young face mephistophelian. "Interfere? Why no, of course not. This fling was part of her own plans, and according to the psycho-analyst for whom she was going in heavily at the time, I would come out a better money-making proposition. In other words, she expected to reap from my wild oats a bounteous harvest for the future!" Amused at Anne's horrified expression, he chuckled sardonically.