“Mother’s more worried about my coming to wicked France than about my being shot up,” he said, presently, and smiled. His mother was the dominant member of the family. She was the last word in orthodoxy and was stubbornly dogmatic. She was religious after the manner of a zealot, but in her life economy took place just before religion. One had to save money and be economical to enter the kingdom of heaven; she could even overlook a few moral lapses in an individual who was frugal and laid by systematically for a rainy day.... All his life Captain Ware had been afraid of pulling down on his head what he privately called his mother’s “tantrums.” These were hysterical outbursts following some escapade of his, or possibly following a mere argument in which economy or religion was mentioned. She could cast stinging darts with her tongue, and when she was opposed, it did not much matter where, she was reckless in dispensing them. Anybody who stood near was likely to be wounded. But she loved her son savagely and jealously, and lived her life and practised her economies for him. Anything which appertained to the perpetuation of the species was somehow abhorrent to her. Here, as everywhere, she was an extremist. Before her son was ten years old she was already in a state of mind, and embarrassed him so that he exerted himself to avoid being alone with her, by questioning him and by very frank warnings.... At ten she gave him a book to read entitled _Plain Facts_. She worked as she thought, frantically, without sparing herself or anybody else ... and the result was that she was burning herself out.... She was a remarkable woman, sometimes a lovable and companionable woman, but so intense, so intolerant of any belief which did not agree perfectly with hers, that people always felt the necessity of being on their guard with her so as not to “set her off.” It was from these parents that Captain Ware inherited, and he was like neither of them.... But traces of both were easy to find in him. When one looks for explanations of his acts, one would do well to study his parents and to see if his acts did not spring from inherited characteristics and tendencies, or were not the result of a revulsion against parental characteristics which had irked him as a boy. Now, for the first time in his life—and he was twenty-six years old—he was cutting loose from family contacts, and cutting loose in this total and revolutionary manner. His first adventure in freedom was into a new world which would not understand him and which he was not equipped to understand himself.... He had always lived at home, except for his four years in college, and his mother’s figure had been always present, for she had made it her business to keep it ever present.... In a few hours he would set his foot on the soil of France.... With one sudden wrench, war had snatched him from an environment dominated by his mother—and set him down in France.