The sort of remarks which I had been addressing to the moon were not
remarks which I ever should have dreamed of addressing to any human
being. I think in justice I might add that. But I had greatly enjoyed
hearing myself say them to the silent night.

XVIII

Actually, I dare say the process of one's sophistication was gradual
enough. But looking back now upon my Dursley period, and the four
years spent in Sydney--and, indeed, my stay in the Orphanage, and my
life with my father in Livorno Bay--it appears to me that my growth,
education, development, whatever it may be called, came at intervals,
jerkily, in sudden leaps forward. The truth probably is that the
development was constant and steady, but that its symptoms declared
themselves spasmodically.

It would seem that there ought to have been a phase of smart, clerkly
dandyism; but perhaps Mr. Rawlence's kindly hospitality in Macquarie
Street nipped that in the bud, substituting for it a kind of twopenny
aestheticism, which made me affect floppy neckties and a studied
negligence of dress, combined with some neglect of the barber. In
these things, as in certain other matters, there were some singular
contradictions and inconsistencies in me, and I was distinctly
precocious. The precocity was due, I take it, to the fact that I had
never known family life, and that my companions had always been older
than myself. I fancy that most people I met supposed me to be at least
three or four years older than I was, and were sedulously encouraged
by me in that supposition. I was precocious, too, in another way. I
could have grown a beard and moustache at seventeen. Instead, I
assiduously plied the razor night and morning, and derived
satisfaction from something which irritated me greatly in later
years--the remarkably rapid and sturdy growth of my beard.

As against these extravagances I must record the fact that my
parsimony in monetary matters survived. Mr. John, in Sussex Street,
presently raised my salary to two pounds ten shillings a week; but I
continued to share Mr. Smith's bedroom, and to pay only sixteen
shillings weekly for my board and lodging. What was more to the point,
I was equally careful in most other matters affecting expenditure, and
never added less than a pound each week to my savings bank account; an
achievement by no means always equalled in after years, even when
earnings were ten times larger. I may have, and did indulge in the
most extravagant