Such remarks also, were designed to instil love and veneration. But again, the gay God intervened. The idea of pain still horrified the boy. Its perversion into a boast still filled him with disgust. He would fain have had it that motherhood be joyous; that the best things be the happy things of life. His mother’s lugubrity in speaking of her works of love struck him as sacrilege. And to a gay God, it was.
Quincy was simply not grown-up. But it seemed to Sarah that in matters of sympathy and feeling, he was strangely backward.
“I should like to be able to talk to you like a man, my dear. You are no longer a child.”
And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be like a man was to be moved by ugly things—like business and money and machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly but wrong,—like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work.
“Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in letting you grow up in New York.”
“Mama—New York is ugly!”
“It is the center of the greatest country of the world,” Sarah replied. “Isn’t that of importance?”
Quincy was moved by her eloquence. Perhaps, that was of importance. Yet something in him mutely stirred negation. He was impressed. But he could not agree. And this conflict fevered him.
“An ugly metropolis is less important than a wild-flower!” he cried, stung to inspiration by his failure to express himself calmly.
Sarah smiled. She had lived among wild-flowers; she knew. She had drudged among them; sweated among them; wanted among them. She was angered by such dangerous illusions in a son of hers.