"I seem hardly at all different from the boy who used to write to you. It is almost exactly the same room, the same hour, only now it is my brother and sister-in-law who occupy the big bed in the big front room. The window looks out at the same lighted windows opposite. And I am the same except that I know myself better and am more sure. What an extraordinary phantasmagoria between our parting and our meeting! How worthless and external adventures can be! How worthless and external the more intimate relationships! But without adventure, without mistakes, folly, suffering, how is that discovery to be made? I suppose my brother never could have made it, but he must have had, perhaps even now he has, his moments when his desire tugs against his little round of habits. He would call himself a happy man, and perhaps he is so. Perhaps we all get what we desire. That would be a comfortable creed, and I could believe it were it not for my mother. One is not born of a woman for nothing. Something binds. There is a deeper knowledge than that of the mind. There is in my mother a quality with which I feel at home, free. But she withholds it from me. I feel she hates it in me, as in herself, as in my father. Hard to find anything else in common between them. I told you that story of how she surrendered to him when he came back. It must have been that in her, taken unawares. It had lived without alarm for so long. It had been stirred in her when I came back from Scotland so full of that idiotic love for you--and after that, I can't follow. Too near to it perhaps, or perhaps it is obscured in me by all I have gone through since. But now she baffles me. She has suffered. Yes. We all suffer, but suffering leads to discovery, to joy, or life is altogether barren. She suffers, she must suffer from living here in the dull house, but she takes her suffering and bottles it up, sterilizes it with religion. Her comfort! From the bottom of my heart I hate it. When she is full of what she calls her religion, then I can only bear with her by my inborn knowledge of her, and for that only the more do I detest the poison that has ruined her splendid life. And how it has been exploited, this voluptuous, selfish pleasure which they dare to call prayer and worship, this cowardly refusal to follow suffering withersoever it leads. I cannot be tolerant about it. To thousands I know, it is no more than bridge or bowls to my brother George, a pastime. But with her, and with all who have a capacity for suffering, it is a passionate negation, and to have lived at all must be a horror. You see, I am almost inarticulate about it. I have tried to break through it and failed. She saw, and closed her eyes, as she must have seen time and again. The delight of seeing almost deliberately debased to fear. I wish I were more used to thinking about people, then I could make it more clear. But it doesn't seem much use, for I go on believing in them and liking them and expecting all sorts of