He had loved her passionately . She had not been pretty in his remembrance -- a tiny , shrunken , wrinkled thing -- but she had beautiful grey eyes that never grew old and a soft , gentle voice -- the only woman 's voice he had ever heard with pleasure . He was very critical as regards women 's voices and very sensitive to them . Nothing hurt him quite so much as an unlovely voice -- not even unloveliness of face . Her death had left him desolate . She was the only human being who had ever understood him . He could never , he thought , have got through his tortured school days without her . After she died he would not go to school . He was not in any sense educated . His father and grandfather had been illiterate men and he had inherited their underdeveloped brain cells . But he loved poetry and read all he could get of it . It overlaid his primitive nature with a curious iridescence of fancy and furnished him with ideals and hungers his environment could never satisfy . He loved beauty in everything . Moonrises hurt him with their loveliness and he could sit for hours gazing at a white narcissus -- much to his aunt 's exasperation . He was solitary by nature . He felt horribly alone in a crowded building but never in the woods or in the wild places along the shore . It was because of this that his aunt could not get him to go to church -- which was a horror to her orthodox soul . He told her he would like to go to church if it were empty but he could not bear it when it was full -- full of smug , ugly people . Most people , he thought , were ugly -- though not so ugly as he was -- and ugliness made him sick with repulsion . Now and then he saw a pretty girl at whom he liked to look but he never saw one that wholly pleased him .
To him , the homely , crippled , poverty-stricken Roger Temple whom they all would have scorned , there was always a certain subtle something wanting , and the lack XXXXX it kept him heartwhole .
along as at in of though through to with without