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Unquestionably the scene most frequently adduced as a potential interpretative key to the action of The Man Who Loved Children is that constituted by Louie's play Tragos: Herpes Rom,1 while high among contenders for the most neglected episode is her nightmare described simply as "hard-soft." As an act of defiance and a play within the unfolding drama of the Pollit household, Louie's fledgling composition invokes comparison with Hamlet's play within a play and similarly assaults the conscience of a tyrant. It is also performed in approximately the fourth act, raising expectations of impending crisis, whereas her "hard-soft" nightmare occurs near the midpoint of the narrative as the second of two recurring dreams and seems without repercussions. The first dream is described in more detail and is repeated elsewhere. It is of a Native American on horseback, whose hoof-beats coincide with the blood throbbing in her temples, his onward course with her own bold images of personal fate. Whereas this dream evokes "beautiful thoughts," the second leaves her screaming and baffled to describe, much less comprehend, its enigmatic contents: "'Hard-soft, hard-soft,' a dream without sight or name, which her hands dreamed by themselves, swelling and shrivelling, hard-soft" (232). There is no iterated description of this terror, nor is its putative link with her dream of manifest destiny elaborated on in the novel. Commentary has faithfully replicated this silence. Its focus falls inevitably on the foregrounded family drama, exploring the clash between Sam and Henny Pollit variously in feminist, psychoanalytical, social realist or postcolonial terms, as well as seeing in Louie an embryonic portrait of the artist, whose development is complemented by Teresa's in For Love Alone.2
Subsumed within these critical approaches, and never investigated comprehensively, is an authorial concern with the shaping and potentially usurping power of strongly held perceptions. Usually the prominence of this issue is attributed to the novel's much-discussed autobiographical basis, that is, to Stead's attempt, in the course of writing, to work through deeply troubling family experience and, in particular, to grapple with her father's overbearing nature. As she avowed in a late interview, prior to its composition she had been a prey to uncontrollable, apparently unmotivated fits of crying "every two months....! didn't know it then, but it was because of...