It could not nave been worse, he thought, if his
mother had stabbed him with a knife. He did not sit beside her in
the railway carriage.
During the first days at Rouen he would not answer when she spoke
to him, nor ask a single question. He had adopted her own tactics;
he carried them through with a cruelty of which he was not aware.
For a long time he had been disposed to criticise her; now that
this criticism was extended to all that she said or did, the
spirit of accusation tinctured her whole life; their joint past
seemed altered and debased.
His father's bent form, in the log chair on the hairless skin,
malodorous and dirty, rose up before him, in vivid contrast with
his mother in her well appointed, airy, perfumed rooms!
When Rafael stood by his father's body he had felt the same thing-
-that the old man had been badly treated. He himself had been
encouraged to neglect his father, to shun him, to evade his
orders. At that time he had laid the blame on the people on the
estate; now he put it all down to his mother's account. His father
had certainly adored her once, and this feeling had changed into
wild self-consuming hatred.
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