Here was a great, new truth to knead into his heart. His father came; his father _was_; and yet no even tenuous chord connected them. From this amazing seed of recognition sprang many varied, new impressions. And it was not long ere infantile wisdom had sensed the truth. There was a reason for his father’s being there, with his rough distant body, and his cold eyes, and his voluminous voice. All else in the world was a note in his own harmony, a weave of his own texture. His father alone--like him--lived with no deeper source. And between them, needed by them both, claimed by them both, was this delicious creature of sweet embrace and warm bestowal! There lay the kernel of all bitterness. For Quincy felt with the fibre of his being, that his mother was not completely, not exclusively his own. She served another. Quincy rolled in the heavy lull that broods before a tempest. He could not grope unassisted across the floor of his world, but the daze of his blue eyes, the clench of his fists betokened already a sense of failure, a sense of loss. The vista-sneer of fatality and disillusion was already smiting its message upon his brow. For could one mistake the things that happened when his father came in upon them? At once, his mother’s touch lost its magic; her face in some way grew clouded. With tense arms she would hurt him; with tense arms lay him away. Fully and splendidly, he came to hate his father. Every nerve of his body melted in fire-fretted agony when he was there. And in reaction, he strained more piteously toward his mother. And so was fashioned above Quincy’s world, a universe. To the bland, simple scheme of self, there now succeeded a period of conflict in which life and pain were grown more close together. The child careered mutely, sullenly, through an intricate design of needs and denials. His soul was become a field of warring colors and discordant forms. The passion rose to a fine _crescendo_. It was therefore destined to subside. Rather than this, however, it was suddenly to disappear. The lifting of the fever pall was in no way gradual. The new calm flung upon him with the placid lilt of a swift bird, sailing downward on wide wings. His first world had been simply himself. On this had followed a universe of struggle and dumb passion. Now, there was born a vision in which Nature and society took smiling order. What had preceded was whirled off, leaving no trace save in the unlabelled deposits of thought and feeling that had foregathered upon Quincy, like heaps of the world’s scattered contents in huddled disarray after the passage of a cyclone. * * * * * Quincy forgot to hate his father. He forgot to love his mother with any intense personal desire, save when she was there, or some concrete demand of help--a fall or a fright--drove him back into the cosmos he had left.