woes and exaltations to oneself. Every man, he reflected, needs a human blotter; that's why most men marry.
"If you but knew your Freud," Rhoda had once said to him, "you'd realize what an incurable mother-complex you've got."
He had retorted that she had an incurable son one, but privately he was inclined to think Rhoda right, for he was forever unconsciously drawing the maternal out of women.
It hurt him now to think how casually he had accepted the priceless care he had received at his mother's hands. Episodes long since obliterated in memory kept coming back to accuse him of remissness. He recalled one birthday when he had been naughtily ungracious at not receiving the present he had set his heart on: an English bicycle with fancy hand brakes which was beyond his mother's restricted means. He had been unfeelingly offhand about the leather music roll she had chosen for him, had even criticized the size of the monogram stamped on the flap. The following morning, in front of the cyclist shop on the main street of Aldergrove, he had come upon his mother in earnest conversation with the proprietor, asking absurdly feminine questions about the mechanism of the coveted bicycle. He had hurried her away, now stubbornly adamant against the purchase, humiliated and irritated at her public display of ignorance of gears and ball-bearings. Now, thirteen years too
