He felt a glad freedom . He put his hand in his pocket to see if his beloved Wordsworth was there and then he took his way across the fields , under a sky of purple and amber , walking quickly despite his limp . He wanted to get to some solitary place where he could forget Aunt Catherine and her abominable suggestions and escape into the world of dreams where he habitually lived and where he found the loveliness he had not found nor could hope to find in his real world . Roger 's mother had died when he was three and his father when he was eight . His little , old , bedridden grandmother had lived until he was twelve . 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 XXXXX a crowded building but never in the woods or in the wild places along the shore .
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