It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to
please than my mother. No one was more chary of praise than she, and she
had a horror of all sentimentality. She met me with superior
intelligence, corrected me, and brought me up by means of satire. It was
possible to impress my aunts, but not her. The profound dread she had of
betraying her feelings or talking about them, the shrewdness that dwelt
behind that forehead of hers, her consistently critical and clear-
sighted nature, the mocking spirit that was so conspicuous in her,
especially in her younger days, gave me, with regard to her, a
conviction that had a stimulating effect on my character--namely, that
not only had she a mother's affection for me, but that the two shrewd
and scrutinising eyes of a very clever head were looking down upon me.
Rational as she was through and through, she met my visionary
inclinations, both religious and philosophical, with unshaken common
sense, and if I were sometimes tempted, by lesser people's over-
estimating of my abilities, to over-estimate them myself, it was she
who, with inflexible firmness, urged her conviction of the limitations
of my nature. None of my weaknesses throve in my mother's neighbourhood.
This was the reason why, during the transitional years between boyhood
and adolescence, the years in which a boy feels a greater need of
sympathy than of criticism and of indulgence than of superiority, I
looked for and found comprehension as much from a somewhat younger
sister of my mother's as from the latter herself.
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