ery lengthy disquisition, and
quoted his Virgil to startling effect:--

Claudite jam rivos, pueri: Sat prata biberunt.

The insistency of his religious conversation was, probably, the
less incomprehensible to me on account of the evangelical
training to which I had been so systematically subjected. It was,
however, none the less intolerably irksome, and would have been
exasperating, I believe, even to a nature in which a powerful and
genuine piety was inherent. To my own, in which a feeble and
imitative faith was expiring, it was deeply vexatious. It led,
alas! to a great deal of bowing in the house of Rimmon, to much
hypocritical ingenuity in drawing my Father's attention away, if
possible, as the terrible subject was seen to be looming and
approaching. In this my stepmother would aid and abet, sometimes
producing incongruous themes, likely to attract my Father aside,
with a skill worthy of a parlour conjurer, and much to my
admiration. If, however, she was not unwilling to come, in this
way, to the support of my feebleness, there was no open collusion
between us. She always described my Father, when she was alone
with me, admiringly, as one 'whose trumpet gave no uncertain
sound'. There was not a tinge of infidelity upon her candid mind,
but she was human, and I think that now and then she was
extremely bored.

My Father was entirely devoid of the prudence which turns away
its eyes and passes as rapidly as possible in the opposite
direction. The peculiar kind of drama in which every sort of
social discomfort is welcomed rather than that the characters
should be happy when guilty of 'acting a lie', was not invented
in those days, and there can hardly be imagined a figure more
remote from my Father than Ibsen. Yet when I came, at a far later
date, to read _The Wild Duck_, memories of the embarrassing
household of my infancy helped me to realize Gregers Werle, with
his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every
compromise that makes life bearable.

I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but combative; if
my Father could have persuaded himself to let me alone, if he
could merely have been willing to leave my subterfuges and my
explanations unanalysed, all would have been well. But he refused
to see any difference in temperament between a lad of twenty and
a sage of sixty. He had no vital sympathy for youth, which in
itself had no charm for him. He had no compassion for the
weaknesses of im