In the years that had followed Eliza’s removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen’s earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.
The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically—he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.
And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues—her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse—came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched.
She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable
