"She did not want you to see how she looked," my father wrote. "She wanted you to remember her always as she was when you saw her last." I remembered her now. What a young beast I had been to forget her, to drop her so utterly out of my thoughts in that selfish happy Paris life, when it was she who had sent me there, when it was she who had set me free for a time from the harbor which was now dragging me back, when it was she from the very start who had fostered this passion for "all that is fine." I remembered her now--remembered and remembered--until her dear image filled me. My father's letter went on to tell how she had fought for her life. Three operations, all three of them failures, but still she had held bravely on in hopes of some new discovery which science might make and so bring her a cure. A thought suddenly gripped me and struck me cold. It had all depended on science, on men working calmly and coldly along in laboratories all over the world, while my mother had held to her thread of life and hoped that these laboratory gods would hurry, hurry while yet there was time! How many thousands like her every day, every hour all over the world were watching those gods with that awful suspense. For they were the only gods that were left, and a comfortless set of gods they were! They were like J. K., they had hay minds! They were businesslike, relentless, cold, they belonged to the world of the harbor! My mother's kind god was a myth and a joke, with no power here one way or the other. I _felt_ that now, I had _thought_ it before, only thought it, with that gay freedom of thought we had aired back there in Paris. But I knew now that deep underneath I had believed all along in this god of hers, as I had in my beautiful goddess of art and in all the things that were fine. It had taken this news from the harbor to bring him tottering, crashing down. For no god like hers would have let her die! And I felt fear now, the fear of Death, whom I'd never really noticed before and who now seemed to say to me, "She is nothing--has gone nowhere--she is only dead!" And fiercely in a bewildered way I rebelled against this emptiness. I rebelled against this world of hay that was so abruptly dragging me back to a sense of its almighty grip on my life. When my ship came up the Bay, the world looked harsh and gray to me, though there was a bright and sunny glare on the muddy waves of the harbor. BOOK II CHAPTER I My mother had been buried several days before I reached home.