filled these
pages, and read what I have written dispassionately, as one of the
outside public might read, I shall have done, once for all, with the
ridiculous fancies that are beginning to make my life a burden. To put
my thoughts in order will make a music. The evil spirit within me will
sleep, will die. I shall be cured. It must be so--it shall be so.

To go back to the beginning. Ah! what a long time ago that seems! As a
child I was cruel. Most boys are cruel, I think. My school companions
were a merciless set--merciless to one another, to their masters when
they had a chance, to animals, to birds. The desire to torture was
in nearly all of them. They loved to bully, and if they bullied only
mildly, it was from fear, not from love. They did not wish their
boomerang to return and slay them. If a boy were deformed, they twitted
him. If a master were kind, or gentle, or shy, they made his life as
intolerable as they could. If an animal or a bird came into their power,
they had no pity. I was like the rest; indeed, I think that I was worse.
Cruelty is horrible. I have enough imagination to do more than know
that--to feel it.

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women
brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is
lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the
torturer.

As a child I was cruel by nature, by instinct. I was a handsome,
well-bred, gentlemanlike, gentle-looking little brute. My parents adored
me, and I was good to them. They were so kind to me that I was almost
fond of them. Why not? It seemed to me as politic to be fond of them as
of anyone else. I did what I pleased, but I did not always let them
know it; so I pleased them. The wise child will take care to foster
the ignorance of its parents. My people were pretty well off, and I was
their only child; but my chief chances of future pleasure in life were
centred in my grandmother, my mother's mother. She was immensely
rich, and she lived here. This room in which I am writing now was her
favourite sitting-room. On that hearth, before a log fire, such as is
burning at this moment, used to sit that wonderful cat of hers--that
horrible cat! Why did I ever play my childish cards to win this house,
this place? Sometimes, lately--very lately only--I have wondered, like a
fool perhaps. Yet would Professor Black say so? I remember, as a boy of
sixteen, paying my last visit here to my gran