was more fascinating
still to look out, with Charlie's help, in the Penny Numbers, for the
foreign places, and people, and creatures mentioned in the tales, and to
find that the truth was often stranger than the fiction.

To live a fancy-life of adventure in my own head, was not merely an
amusement to me at this time--it was a refuge. Matters did not really
improve between me and my father, though I had obeyed his wishes. It
was by his arrangement that I spent so much of my time at home with the
Woods, and yet it remained a grievance that I liked to do so. Whether my
dear mother had given up all hopes of my becoming a genius I do not
know, but my father's contempt for my absorption in a book was unabated.
I felt this if he came suddenly upon me with my head in my hands and my
nose in a tattered volume; and if I went on with my reading it was with
a sense of being in the wrong, whilst if I shut up the book and tried to
throw myself into outside interests, my father's manner showed me that
my efforts had only discredited my candour.

As is commonly the case, it was chiefly little things that pulled the
wrong way of the stuff of life between us, but they pulled it very much
askew. I was selfishly absorbed in my own dreams, and I think my dear
father made a mistake which is a too common bit of tyranny between
people who love each other and live together. He was not satisfied with
my _doing_ what he liked, he expected me to _be_ what he liked, that is,
to be another person instead of myself. Wives and daughters seem now and
then to respond to this expectation as to the call of duty, and to
become inconsistent echoes, odd mixtures of severity and hesitancy,
hypocrites on the highest grounds; but sons are not often so
self-effacing, and it was not the case with me. It was so much the case
with my dear mother, that she never was of the slightest use (which she
might have been) when my father and I misunderstood each other. By my
father's views of the moment she always hastily set her own, whether
they were fair or unfair to me; and she made up for it by indulging me
at every point that did not cross an expressed wish of my father's, or
that could not annoy him because he was not there. She never held the
scales between us.

And yet it was the thought of her which kept me from taking my fate into
my own hands again and again. To have obeyed my father seemed to have
done so little towards making him satisfied with me, that I f