environment, for his present disregard for his former boy friends, healthy, young animals, who played games, smoked cigarettes in private, and boasted, furtively, of certain desirable relationships they had formed with girls in the Bohemian quarter. To himself, Gareth now, quite justifiably, seemed ages older than these untutored savages. They, to be frank, regarded Gareth with even greater disfavour.
He had begun his imaginative understanding of the world even earlier by understanding his father and mother. From a very tender age there had always been a sharp division in his feeling for these two parents. It was through his mother, who sympathized quite blindly with his efforts at mental escape, that he eventually got everything he wanted; wants always opposed at first, and frequently to the end, by his father. He had come to sense at last that his father's course, long established and now habitual, traditional even, a routine that could be depended upon, was, to a large extent, dictated by jealousy, jealousy of Gareth's love for his mother and her love for him. To Mrs. Johns, indeed, Gareth was the whole excuse for God having created the world, and she was not always clever enough to conceal this exaggerated emotion for her son from her husband. As for the boy, he was well aware that his mother was the only human being he had yet met capable of arousing any successful response in him. He did not analyze his love for her; he simply ac-
