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As the car inserted its decrepit bulk into the Albany Street traffic and crawled noisily past Great Portland Street Station into Great Portland Street, hot on the scent of the absurd, he recognized that his mother had behaved with absurdity in conspiring with Mr. Harding to beget him, in an embrace that is not objectively edifying and is accompanied by pants and grunts and expressions of ridiculous and unmerited approval of the dull solicitor whose name he bore. Dignified as she was in the antechamber of death, lying exhausted by life in that chair to which she seemed glued, in that, her present form, his mother had little connection with the young Frenchwoman who passed almost half her life in a bed with Mr. Harding, for the sole purpose of bringing into life René and his three sisters. All the values were wrong in that bed. Neither of the excited couple considered what they were doing or they would have quitted the bed immediately. Of course his mother now, with a great big bearded monster like himself in front of her, must dimly realize how frivolous she had been (for she was not such a brute as Essie); and today she had, with disgust, even believed that she had given birth to a fool, into the bargain, pauvre chérie!