 attempt at mastery.
    »Your father was different. Unlike me - all lovingness and affection. I knew
I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I married him, that
he would put no hindrance in the way of my being an artist. My father was on his
deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my
marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's
who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. I meant to have
my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of
my father - always I had had an awe of him: it was impossible to help it. I
hated to feel awed - I wished I could have defied him openly; but I never could.
It was what I could not imagine: I could not act it to myself that I should
begin to defy my father openly and succeed. And I never would risk failure.«
    That last sentence was uttered with an abrupt emphasis, and she paused after
it as if the words had raised a crowd of remembrances which obstructed speech.
Her son was listening to her with feelings more and more highly mixed: the first
sense of being repelled by the frank coldness which had replaced all his
preconceptions of a mother's tender joy in the sight of him; the first impulses
of indignation at what shocked his most cherished emotions and principles - all
these busy elements of collision between them were subsiding for a time, and
making more and more room for that effort at just allowance and that admiration
of a forcible nature whose errors lay along high pathways, which he would have
felt if, instead of being his mother, she had been a stranger who had appealed
to his sympathy. Still it was impossible to be dispassionate: he trembled lest
the next thing she had to say would be more repugnant to him than what had gone
before: he was afraid of the strange coercion she seemed to be under to lay her
mind bare: he almost wished he could say, »Tell me only what is necessary,« and
then again he felt the fascination that made him watch her and listen to her
eagerly. He tried to recall her to particulars by asking -
    »Where was my grandfather's home?«
    »Here in Genoa, when I was married; and his family had lived here
generations ago. But my father had been in various countries.«
    »You must surely have lived in England?«
