Yet I sometimes confessed to myself that I was exactly the opposite of the altruist. The renascence of her love would gain more for me than for her; mine was a craven peace-making. I was further hypocritical in that I acted for the young doctor’s applause. Just as I had concealed from Miss Pride the marks of sleepless, undisciplined nights, in the doctor’s presence I feigned joy at seeing my mother again after seven days’ separation, and, on the return, grief at her unhappiness. We can be over-scrupulous, beg our confessors to double our punishment since they, we declare, have been too innocent to grasp the magnitude of our sin. We can, in love, doubt that we really love and suspect that we have bluffed our lover into the passion which will at any moment perish when he sees we have won him with half lies; or, brooding over a slip of the tongue, a misstatement, we can convince ourselves that our minds are really stupid and that all our words are fraudulent. Our conscience is speaking to us in parables. Thus, my desire to become once more the center of my mother’s life was earnest. What was contemptible was my publication of it to the doctor as if it could not stand alone, or as if since it could engender no reward for me I must seek his praise for compensation.

His education of me had its more practical specialties. Where I had heretofore read at Miss Pride’s prescription and had felt false to her standards if I had chosen something not primarily useful, I now, at the doctor’s advice, followed my own inclinations, and was even persuaded that the writers she most admired, that is, James Russell Lowell and Emerson, were by no means inviolable and that the mortar of her ivory tower was chauvinism, not knowledge or taste. For observe, Dr. McAllister counseled me, she was uncritical of style and uninterested in a writer’s conception of truth, but if he had been buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord or lay in a less illustrious but still New England graveyard, he was a great man. She believed neither in Emerson’s oversoul nor in Thoreau’s religion of blueberries and Walden Pond; she was unimpressed by Henry Adams’ genius, had even remarked once that he was a little too long-winded for her liking. I was not disillusioned by this exposé, but on the contrary delighted in her consistency, deplored by her demigod as the hobgoblin of little minds. But at the same time, I was liberated from the tyranny of The Atlantic and of Harriet Martineau’s peregrinations.