harmless in themselves, must not be done or said in the presence of
papa. He did not always remember his own rules, and there was thus an
element of injustice in his rebukes, which one merely accepted as part
of his awful and unaccountable greatness.

When I was transferred to a private school, a great big place, very
well managed in every way, I lived for a time in atrocious terror of
everything and everybody. I was conscious of a great code of rules
which I did not know or understand, which I might quite unwittingly
break, and the consequences of which might be fatal. I was never
punished or caned, nor was I ever bullied. But I simply effaced myself
as far as possible, and lived in dread of disaster. The thought even
now of certain high blank walls with lofty barred windows, the
remembered smells of certain passages and corners, the tall form and
flashing eye of our headmaster and the faint fragrance of Havana cigars
which hung about him, the bare corridors with their dark cupboards, the
stone stairs and iron railings--all this gives me a far-off sense of
dread. I can give no reason for my unhappiness there; but I can
recollect waking in the early summer mornings, hearing the screams of
peacocks from an adjoining garden, and thinking with a dreadful sense
of isolation and despair of all the possibilities of disaster that lay
hid in the day. I am sure it was not a wholesome experience. One need
not fear the world more than is necessary--but my only dream of peace
was the escape to the delights of home, and the thought of the larger
world was only a thing that I shrank from and shuddered at.

No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, but how few they seemed and
how clearly they stand out! I did not make friends among the boys; they
were pleasant enough acquaintances, some of them, but not to be trusted
or confided in; they had to be kept at arm's length, and one's real
life guarded and hoarded away from them; because if one told them
anything about one's home or one's ideas, it might be repeated, and the
sacred facts shouted in one's ears as taunts and jests. But there was a
little bluff master, a clergyman, with shaggy rippled red-brown hair
and a face like a pug-dog. He was kind to me, and had me to lunch one
Sunday in a villa out at Barnes--that was a breath of life, to sit in a
homelike room and look at old Punches half the afternoon; and there was
another young man, a master, rather stout and pale, with whom I s