He had by this time as great a respect for my uncle as I had myself, but could not feel at home with him as I did. Whether the vision was only a vision, or indeed my uncle's double, whatever a double may be, the tale of it could hardly be an agreeable one to him; and naturally John shrank from the risk of causing him the least annoyance. The question of course came up, what he was to do when able to leave us. He had spoken very plainly to my uncle concerning his relations with his mother--had told him indeed that he could not help suspecting he owed his illness to her. I was nearly always present when they talked, but remember in especial a part of what passed on one occasion. “I believe I understand my mother,” said John, “--but only after much thinking. I loved her when a child; and if she had not left me for the sake of liberty and influence--that at least is how I account for her doing so--I might at this moment be struggling for personal freedom, instead of having that over.” “There are women,” returned my uncle, “some of them of the most admired, who are slaves to a demoniacal love of power. The very pleasure of their consciousness consists in the knowledge that they have power--not power to do things, but power to make other people do things. It is an insanity, but a devilishly immoral and hateful insanity.--I do not say the lady in question is one of such, for I do not know her; I only say I have known such a one.” John replied that certainly the love of power was his mother's special weakness. She was spoiled when a child, he had been told; had her every wish regarded, her every whim respected. This ruinous treatment sprang, he said, from the self-same ambition, in another form, on the part of her mother--the longing, namely, to secure her child's supreme affection--with the natural consequence that they came to hate one another. His father and she had been married but fifteen months, when he died of a fall, following the hounds. Within six months she was engaged, but the engagement was broken off, and she went abroad, leaving him behind her. She married lord Cairnedge in Venice, and returned to England when John was nearly four, and seemed to have lost all memory of her. His stepfather was good to him, but died when he was about eight. His mother was very severe. Her object plainly was to plant her authority so in his very nature, that he should never think of disputing her will. “But,” said John, “she killed my love, and so I grew able to cast off her yoke.” “The world would fare worse, I fancy,” remarked my uncle, “if violent women bore patient children. The evil would become irremediable. The children might not be ruined, but they would bring no discipline to the mother!”