For Gundred was incapable of any true companionship with her son. He admired her, he loved her distantly and diffidently, but he shrank from her, and had nothing intimate or warm to say. That she was not conscious of this flaw in their relation may be called the compensating mercy of that weakness in herself which had developed that flaw. She was by now almost entirely devoid of intuitive intelligence. Or, rather, perhaps, she had so diligently trained herself that, in the long course of time, she had drilled her mind out of any faint tendency to perceive and analyze that it may ever have possessed. Her sense of decency commanded her to live entirely on the surface of things; prying into secret motives and feelings she considered vulgar and indecent. Accordingly, if lip-kisses were properly exchanged, and superficial affection reigned, she made a point of considering that the soul-relations thus symbolized must be eminently satisfactory. She looked no further than the symbol, and disliked the idea that kisses and terms of endearment may, after all, not stand for the love whose emblems they are--may even, at a pinch, be used to disguise the lack of that love. And yet her hidden, shamefaced jealousy may be taken to have been the last flickering phantom of the natural woman’s insight into domestic relations. All his life she had grudged her son his friendships, gently nipped them with the frost of her criticism, sedulously taught him to find fault and be captious. The education had borne no fruit in Jim, except a bitter one for Gundred. His nature was too warm and sunny to have any real communion with his mother’s frosts, and as soon as he found that she always had something coldly unpleasant to say of everyone he liked, he had responded, not by discarding his friends, but by drawing farther and farther away from his mother. With the merciless clear-sightedness of the young, so vivid, if so limited, he had judged his mother by her own precepts long since, and found her wanting. She endlessly preached the loveliest morality, the tenderest forbearance towards all the world, the most sedulous avoidance of harsh or censorious comment. And yet she was always sure to pick some fatal flaw in all his friends, to discover and expose some blemish, to insist on some fault or weakness. And the very fact that her criticisms were always more or less just militated, in the end, against her influence. For Jim found that he liked his friends more than he disliked their failings, and, taking their side accordingly, he gradually came to look upon his mother’s unerring eye for other people’s shortcomings as the worst enemy of his own happiness. Thus pitiably, by the exaggeration of her own virtues, through the keenness of her own maternal love, Gundred laid up for herself inevitable disappointment in regard to the one thing that her heart desired, and innocently prepared for herself a dark version of the mother’s tragedy. By now Jim had his friends and his life to