He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief.

His mother and the bishop at Tuebingen and on the Baltic! Curiously enough, they did not seem very remote.

He adored his mother and the bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast kinship, perhaps have identity.

And the name of that identity was Olivia.

So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or a touch--startled him awake.