"Why should you doubt it?"
"I don't know. There's something about you...."
"Mother," he said, "how strange it is that you and Father...."
"Well?"
"Have never really found each other! You so often think the same things."
"Did Papa also think ...?"
"Just now ... almost the same as you."
"We have learnt to bear with each other, darling."
"But you have never found each other," he said, faintly; and his voice broke.
She looked at him; she understood that he too had not found his wife. She saw it: he was not happy in himself. A sword seemed suddenly to cut through her soul; and she was filled with self-reproach as from a well. Was it not all her fault, that her son was not happy now?... Was it not the result of his childhood, the result of his up-bringing?... The melancholy that had come after the excessive earnestness of his first youth ... was it not her fault?