There, in that system, his hatred was absolute. But when something encroached upon it and entered the space between his own I and his convictions, a space which, besides whatever passageways there may have been within it that were unfamiliar to him, was quite empty, his hatred did not apply. His hatred applied to the others. In that space was the memory of his mother, for instance, and that it had remained so strong becomes plain to us in the fact that every Christmas, the time of his mother’s death, he would descend into silence and dejection, as he did in 1915 at the front, and in that space
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