This was too much for Tomas; he flung himself down on the piano and cried, got up hastily, put on his hat and coat and went out, heedless of his mother's prayers to him to stay and talk it over with her, as they used to do in old days. He could not do it; for there was something in his mother's behaviour towards him which wounded him. When he had come home she had received him with the greatest admiration, everything he said and did was right; but after the lecture she began to doubt. This had gradually increased, until now she put a note of interrogation to everything he said. At the first complaint from the teachers she had taken the school from him; and she could reconcile this with her pride in his way of ordering it, and a crooning quiet delight over its success. Not that her doubt was greater than a practical understanding like hers had perhaps a right to; he did not blame her for it, but he could not bear it. This affair with the teachers was dreadful. He really considered them most excellent, none more so than Karen Lote, otherwise he would never have troubled himself about her. There must be something at the very root of his behaviour towards people, which was terribly astray when he could be thus utterly misunderstood. Perhaps his own feeling of emptiness and distaste arose from the same cause. These ladies had raved about him. They and the senior class, and.... Was that, too, nothing but a delusion, or was it past and gone? "Raved about him." What is that? He drove it from him with contempt, yet once it pleased and deluded him. He had believed it would always continue. No, he who would have the affection of others must show affection to them. And he could not do it--in the way that others could. After all that was not strange. His race had perhaps exhausted its power of winning human affection. Was not that the natural result when generation after generation broke down mankind's precepts of fidelity, and flung aside man's good opinion? The race itself had been ruined, as each one weakened himself and his offspring--ay, and others and their offspring as well. He walked into the country to the left--the same walk that he had taken that spring evening after he had given his lecture. He recalled to his mind how happy had been his return from America, how he had dreamed of giving his countrymen an example which, if they would follow it, would shine throughout the world. What was nobler for a small country than to centre its greatest powers on the teaching of its children, to expend its surplus there; let the great nations waste theirs on armies! He remembered how it then delighted him to think that in this way the sins of his forefathers might be expiated. Everything on earth had been thus developed.