Right after that, he fell in love again, this time with his mother. The longevity treatment was still fairly new; few had stopped to consider that, as men grew older, their mothers remained young, as tender and fresh as girls in school, and there is no woman as close to a man as his mother. Inevitably, a great many men fell in love that way. Wainer was one. His mother, poor girl, never suspected, and it was pure anguish for him. It was some time before he had recovered enough to talk about it, and by then he was thirty. One of the ways he recovered was by writing more music. There were a lot of lesser works, and then came the First Symphony. Looking back over the centuries, I cannot understand how the thing was so controversial. The Rashes wrote of it harshly in all their papers. The Rejects almost unanimously agreed that it was a masterpiece. I myself, when I heard it, became aware that Wainer was a great man. * * * * * Because of the controversy which raged for a while, Wainer made some money, but the effect of the criticism was to keep him from writing for years. There is something in that First Symphony of the Wainer of later years, some of the hungry, unfinished, incomprehensible strength. Wainer knew that if he wrote anything else, it would be much like the First, and he recoiled from going through it all again. He went back to the beaches. He had something rare in those days--a great love for the sea. I suppose it was to him what space is to others. I know that the next thing he wrote was a wild, churning, immortal thing which he called Water Music; and I know that he himself loved it best of anything he wrote, except, of course, the Tenth Symphony. But this time was worse than the last. The only ones who paid any attention to Water Music were the Rejects, and they didn't count. If Wainer had been a true composer, he would have gone on composing whether anyone cared or not, but as I have said, he was not really an artist. Despite the fact that he was the greatest composer we have ever known, music was only a small thing to him. He had a hint, even then, that although he had been born on Earth there was something in him that was alien, and that there was so much left to do, so much to be seen, and because he could not understand what it was that fired him, he ground himself raw, slowly, from within, while walking alone by the rocks on the beaches.