"We will leave you and go back, Stephen," she said, while a look of
faintness spread over her features. "I feel as if one of my heart
attacks might be coming on."
"Wouldn't you rather I went home with you?" he inquired solicitously.
His mother shook her head and reached feebly for Margaret's hand.
"Margaret will take care of me," she replied in the weak voice before
which her husband and her children had learned to tremble.
As he sat there uneasily in the stuffy car, which smelt of camphor and
reminded him of a hearse, he was threatened by that familiar sensation
of oppression, of closing walls. Would he ever again be free from this
impalpable terror, from this dread of being shut within a space so small
that he must smother if he did not escape? And not only places but
persons, as he had found long ago, persons with closed souls, with
narrow minds, produced in him this feeling of physical suffocation.
Margaret, with her serenity, her changeless sweetness, affected him
precisely as he was affected by the stained glass windows of a church.
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