It was adoration.

I was nine, I say, when things happened.

Another man, a divorce, and on the day of the divorce this woman, my mother, married her lover.
Somewhere in my father's brain a single thread snapped, and from that day he was mad--mad on but one subject; and so deep and intense was his madness that it became a part of me as the years passed, and to-day I, too, am possessed of that madness.

And it is the one greatest thing in the world that I am proud of, John Aldous!" Not once had her voice betrayed excitement or emotion.

Not once had it risen above its normal tone; and in her eyes, as they turned from the lake to him, there was the tranquillity of a child.
"And that madness," she resumed, "was the madness of a man whose brain and soul were overwrought in one colossal hatred--a hatred of divorce and the laws that made it possible.