and tolerable achievement
in life, though deep in my lost depths I wanted passionately to excel; I
worked hard, much harder than I allowed to appear, and I said I did it
for the credit of the school; I affected a dignified loyalty to queen
and country and church; I pretended a stoical disdain for appetites and
delights and all the arts, though now and then a chance fragment of
poetry would light me like a fire, or a lovely picture stir unwonted
urgencies, though visions of delight haunted the shadows of my
imagination and did not always fly when I regarded them. But on the
other hand I affected an interest in games that I was far from feeling.
Of some boys I was violently jealous, and this also I masked beneath a
generous appreciation. Certain popularities I applauded while I doubted.
Whatever my intimate motives I became less and less disposed to obey
them until I had translated them into a plausible rendering of the
accepted code. If I could not so translate them I found it wise to
control them. When I wanted urgently one summer to wander by night over
the hills towards Kestering and lie upon heather and look up at the
stars and wonder about them, I cast about and at last hit upon the
well-known and approved sport of treacling for moths, as a cloak for so
strange an indulgence.

I must have known even then what a mask and front I was, because I knew
quite well how things were with other people. I listened politely and
respected and understood the admirable explanations of my friends. When
some fellow got a scholarship unexpectedly and declared it was rotten
bad luck on the other chap, seeing the papers he had done, and doubted
whether he shouldn't resign, I had an intuitive knowledge that he
wouldn't resign, and I do not remember any time in my career as the
respectful listener to Mr. Siddons' aspirations for service and
devotion, when I did not perceive quite clearly his undeviating eye upon
a bishopric. He thought of gaiters though he talked of wings.

How firmly the bonds of an old relationship can hold one! I remember
when a few years ago he reached that toiled-for goal, I wrote in a tone
of gratified surprise that in this blatant age, such disinterested
effort as his should receive even so belated a recognition. Yet what
else was there for me to write? We all have our Siddonses, with whom
there are no alternatives but insincerity or a disproportionate
destructiveness. I am still largely Siddonsized, little son,