When he was twelve years old his mother discovered a journal in which he had set down some of his intimacies with the Creator. She admonished him for his absurdities and burned the book. The incident helped to develop his resistance to the opinions of those who would destroy his consoling fancies. He noted precociously symptoms of his mother's weaknesses.
By the time he was sent away to college he had developed his secret defense, and his timidity was no longer so apparent. His progress through his courses, while erratic, was in part brilliant. When he returned home after his first absence his father showed some pride in the visit.
At eighteen Dudley had evolved a philosophy which permitted him to look upon himself as a prophet. Praise irritated him as much as blame. When people made him angry he retorted to them with waspish sarcasms. When he was alone he worked himself into transports of despair which made him happy. He thought of himself as the peculiar interpreter of universal life. He liked to go out in the woods and fields alone, and under the trees to take his clothes off and roll in the grass. He was recklessly generous on occasion, in defiance of habits of penuriousness. He felt most kindly toward Negroes, day laborers, and other people whose social status was inferior to his own. Yet among his own kind he exacted every recognition of social superiority.
After vexatious arguments with his father, he went to Paris to continue the study of painting. His technical facility surprised every one. His conversations were facile and worldly, he was impeccable in his dress, while he thought of a trilogy in spirit which embraced David in Israel, Spinoza, and himself. His greatest fear in life was the fear of ridicule. The physical cowardice which had oppressed his childhood remained with him, and his escape from it was still through his religious belief in his inward significance. Men of the crasser type despised him utterly, and he confuted them with stinging cleverness. A few who were artists were attracted by the rich, almost feminine quality of his emotions. He found these men, rather than the women he knew, were the dominant figures in his life.
He was in terror of all women with whom he could not establish himself on planes of physical intimacy. But after he had arrived at such a state with them, they interested him very little. Their attraction for him was curious, rarely compelling. In all of his affairs his condition was complicated by his fear of relinquishing any influence he had once been able to assert.
When he returned to America after two years abroad he felt stronger by the intellectual distances which separated him from his former life. If he had not rebelled against the tone of condescension in which his fellow artists referred to his youthful success, he might have been contented with the humbler friends who were waiting to lionize him. He continued to cultivate an aloofness which sustained his pride as much against inferior compliments as, in the past, it had protected him from jibes.
He could not console himself with the praises of most of the women he met, for he always fancied that they were attempting to flatter him into entanglements. When he encountered Julia, however, the mixture of egoism and humility which he sensed in her discontent intrigued his vanity. He saw that she was isolated and unhappy, and he longed for an admiration which his discrimination would not condemn. In her he anticipated a disciple of whom he need not be ashamed; but until she should be sexually disarmed he was frightened of her.
May and Paul were in the park, by the side of the lake. The water was caught in meshes of hot rays as in a web. In the sky, above the trees, the light, drawn inward from the vague horizon, glowed in a fathomless spot where the sun was sinking. The grass was uncut in the field about them and the little seeded tops floated in a red-lilac mist above the green stems.
"I don't like your Aunt Julia, May!"