he might know for others, with that almost mystic knowledge which healed as though by a suggestive force deep down within himself, however much he might know what was good for their bodies and souls, for himself he knew nothing, least of all for his soul! . . . To them his young life seemed to move from one goal to another, always certain of itself through the windings of its course; yet that was all on the surface; and he knew nothing of himself! . . . His own disease was insufficiency; and of recent years he had felt it swelling within him fuller and fuller, eating into him deeper and deeper. . . .
He saw himself again as a child—his first recollection—between his two parents, his father taking him from his mother's lap, his mother taking him from his father's arms; and amid the unconsciousness of his earliest childhood he had always felt the jarring and jealousy between them. Very soon his blood made him speak, that calm unfevered Dutch blood; and his unfevered Dutch nature could be seen in his serious eyes; from the first his Dutch seriousness and steadying composure had been able to find, if not always words, at least sounds of consoling reconciliation, of riper tenderness for that mother, who hugged him in her arms, for that father, whom he came to regard so soon as a bigger and older brother. And this when he was still a little fellow. It had been like that ever since he could remember; from the time when he was a child in the nursery, stroking Mother's tearful eyes and bringing a laugh to Father's pouting mouth; and, as he grew older and bigger, he remembered, it had always been like that: he knew himself to have been their comfort. . . . It was small wonder that, when still quite young, he had begun to think of the comfort that he was and had then
