id, "a crimson Virginia creeper in it--all one bright uniform crimson,
in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into the
impression somehow, though I don't clearly remember how, and there were
horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green door. They
were blotched yellow and green, you know, not brown nor dirty, so that
they must have been new fallen. I take it that means October. I look out
for horse-chestnut leaves every year and I ought to know.

"If I'm right in that, I was about five years and four months old."

He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learnt to talk at an
abnormally early age, and he was so sane and "old-fashioned," as people
say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most children
scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was two, and he
was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess.
His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave him little attention,
and expected great things of him. For all his brightness he found life a
little grey and dull, I think. And one day he wandered.

He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away,
nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that had faded
among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and the green door
stood out quite distinctly.

As his memory of that childish experience ran, he did at the very first
sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire
to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same time he had
the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him--
he could not tell which--to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it
as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning--unless memory has
played him the queerest trick--that the door was unfastened, and that he
could go in as he chose.

I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it
was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never
explained, that his father would be very angry if he went in through that
door.

Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost
particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in
his pockets and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right
along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean dirty
shops, and particularly th