"Well?"
"At the end of a week the tutor, disgusted with Frederick's dullness, rudeness, and violence, left the house."
"But to what do you attribute this remarkable change?"
"I thought and still think that it is due to natural or rather physical causes. There are many instances of similar crises in youths on attaining the age of puberty. It is a time of life when the salient traits of character begin to manifest themselves, when the man succeeding the youth begins to show what he is going to be some day. This metamorphosis nearly always causes serious disturbance throughout the entire system, and it is quite probable that Frederick is now under the influence of this phenomenon."
"Doesn't this very plausible explanation reassure Madame Bastien?"
"One can never entirely reassure a mother, at least a mother like that. The reasons I gave her calmed her fears for awhile, but the trouble increased and she took fright again. In her interview with me just now she made no attempt to disguise her fears, and even accused herself of being to blame for the recent state of things. 'I am his mother and yet I cannot divine what is the matter with him, so I certainly must be lacking in penetration and in maternal instinct. I am his mother, and yet he will not tell me the cause of the trouble that is killing him. It is my fault. It must be. I cannot have been a good mother. A mother has always done something wrong if she cannot succeed in gaining her child's confidence.'"
"Poor woman!" exclaimed Henri. "She wrongs herself, though, in considering her maternal instinct in fault."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, doesn't her instinct warn her that you are wrong, plausible as your explanation of her son's condition is, for, in spite of her confidence in you, and in spite of the desire she feels to be reassured, your assurances have not calmed her fears."
Then, after sitting silent and thoughtful for a moment, Henri asked: