I never made anybody happy.

Your father always made himself happy, and he liked being himself, but I suspect you haven't liked being yourself, poor Michael.

But now that you're living the life you chose, which vexes your father, is it better with you ?" The shyness had gone from the gaze that he had seen her direct at him at dinner, which fugitively fluttered away when she saw that it was observed, and now that it was bent so unwaveringly on him he saw shining through it what he had never seen before, namely, the mother-love which he had missed all his life.

Now, for the first time, he saw it; recognising it, as by divination, when, with ray serene and untroubled, it burst through the mists that seemed to hang about his mother's mind.
Before, noticing her change of manner, her restless questions, he had been vaguely alarmed, and as they went on the alarm had become more pronounced; but at this moment, when there shone forth the mother-instinct which had never come out or blossomed in her life, but had been overlaid completely with routine and conventionality, rendering it too indolent to put forth petals, Michael had no thought but for that which she had never given him yet, and which, now it began to expand before him, he knew he had missed all his life.
She took up his big hand that lay on his knee and began timidly stroking it.
"Since you have been away," she said, "and since your father has been vexed with you, I have begun to see how lonely you must have been.

What taught me that, I am afraid, was only that I have begun to feel lonely, too.