Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for the little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family.

My mother reinforced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of music which she had followed in her prime freely for love.

I only helped to spend it.

People wondered at my heartlessness: one young and romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indignantly with me, "for the which" as Pepys said of the shipwright's wife who refused his advances, "I did respect her." Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense) instead of a slave.

And I protest that I will not suffer James Huneker or any romanticist to pass me off as a peasant boy qualifying for a chapter in Smiles's Self Help, or a good son supporting a helpless mother, instead of a stupendously selfish artist leaning with the full weight of his hungry body on an energetic and capable woman.
No, James: such lies are not only unnecessary, but fearfully depressing and fundamentally immoral, besides being hardly fair to the supposed peasant lad's parents.