n the West, the centre of anxiety was still the
meek and docile heart, dedicated to the Lord's service, which
must, at all hazards and with all defiance of the rules of life,
be kept unspotted from the world.

The torment of a postal inquisition began directly I was settled
in my London lodgings. To my Father--with his ample leisure, his
palpitating apprehension, his ready pen--the flow of
correspondence offered no trouble at all; it was a grave but
gratifying occupation. To me the almost daily letter of
exhortation, with its string of questions about conduct, its
series of warnings, grew to be a burden which could hardly be
borne, particularly because it involved a reply as punctual and
if possible as full as itself. At the age of seventeen, the
metaphysics of the soul are shadowy, and it is a dreadful thing
to be forced to define the exact outline of what is so undulating
and so shapeless. To my Father there seemed no reason why I
should hesitate to give answers of full metallic ring to his hard
and oft-repeated questions; but to me this correspondence was
torture. When I feebly expostulated, when I begged to be left a
little to myself, these appeals of mine automatically stimulated,
and indeed blew up into fierce flames, the ardour of my Father's
alarm.

The letter, the only too-confidently expected letter, would lie
on the table as I descended to breakfast. It would commonly be,
of course, my only letter, unless tempered by a cosy and chatty
note from my dear and comfortable stepmother, dealing with such
perfectly tranquillizing subjects as the harvest of roses in the
garden or the state of health of various neighbours. But the
other, the solitary letter, in its threatening whiteness, with
its exquisitely penned address--there it would lie awaiting me,
destroying the taste of the bacon, reducing the flavour of the
tea to insipidity. I might fatuously dally with it, I might
pretend not to observe it, but there it lay. Before the morning's
exercise began, I knew that it had to be read, and what was
worse, that it had to be answered. Useless the effort to conceal
from myself what it contained. Like all its precursors, like all
its followers, it would insist, with every variety of appeal, on
a reiterated declaration that I still fully intended, as in the
days of my earliest childhood, 'to be on the Lord's side' in
everything.

In my replies, I would sometimes answer precisely as I was
desired to answer; sometimes