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. This aunt was all
heart. She had an ardent, enthusiastic brain, was full of tenderness and
goodness and the keenest feeling for everything deserving of sympathy,
not least for me, while she had not my mother's critical understanding.
Her judgment might be obscured by passion; she sometimes allowed herself
to be carried to imprudent extremes; she had neither Mother's
equilibrium nor her satirical qualities. She was thus admirably adapted
to be the confidant of a big boy whom she gave to understand that she
regarded as extraordinarily gifted. When these transitional years were
over, Mother resumed undisputed sway, and the relations between us
remained in all essentials the same, even after I had become much her
superior in knowledge and she in some things my pupil. So that it
affected me very much when, many years after, my younger brother said to
me somewhat sadly: "Has it struck you, too, that Mother is getting old?"
"No, not at all," I replied. "What do you think a sign of it?" "I think,
God help me, that she is beginning to admire us."


XIII.