Why did my mother marry Enoch Vand? Not for the reason William held—that public and plausible justification of an unjustifiable suddenness which, like the rest of my mother's fabrications drawn up to satisfy William's respectability, William gave out to me as conservatively as if he believed her lie. It was to himself he lied. Without having to be persuaded, and after so long resisting persuasion, my mother married Enoch Vand: but she married him not for me. In name or act he would not feign fatherhood. He thought me an impediment—not to freedom, but to honesty—and my mother knew it; also William knew it; I dimly knew it, feeling behind Enoch's self-conscious indifference to me a more encompassing indifference. He had the disregard and detachment of one who has given up, yet perversely retains a metaphysical interest in the motions and motives not of the abandoned thing, but of renunciation itself. This brought my mother to him. A marriage can be a sacrament of despair, and a seal on loss.
