He emerged from
childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a
less roundabout course might have been taken to make him happy, but with
a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human
freedom, and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was
about fifteen, he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his
mother was a saint. She had always been a very distinct presence in his
life, but so ineffably gentle a one that his sense was fully opened to
it only by the danger of losing her. She had an illness which for many
months was liable at any moment to terminate fatally, and during her
long-arrested convalescence she removed the mask which she had worn for
years by her husband's order. Rowland spent his days at her side and
felt before long as if he had made a new friend. All his impressions at
this period were commented and interpreted at leisure in the future, and
it was only then that he understood that his mother had been for fifteen
years a perfectly unhappy woman. Her marriage had been an immitigable
error which she had spent her life in trying to look straight in the
face.
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