of my childish memory, which makes me think, after all these years and
all the countries I have travelled in, and all the women I have seen,
that my darling mother, though so little known and so little loved, was
the most beautiful woman in the world.

Even yet I cannot but wonder that other people, my father especially,
did not see her with my eyes. I think he was fond of her after his own
fashion, but there was a kind of involuntary contempt in his affection,
which could not conceal itself from my quick little eyes. She was
visibly afraid of him, and was always nervous and timid when he came
into our room with his customary salutation,

"How now, Isabel? And how's this child of yours?"

From my earliest childhood I noticed that he always spoke of me as if I
had been my mother's child, not his, and perhaps this affected my
feeling for him from the first.

I was in terror of his loud voice and rough manner, the big bearded man
with the iron grey head and the smell of the fresh air about his thick
serge clothes. It was almost as if I had conceived this fear before my
birth, and had brought it out of the tremulous silence of my mother's
womb.

My earliest recollections are of his muffled shout from the room below,
"Keep your child quiet, will you?" when I was disturbing him over his
papers by leaping and skipping about the floor. If he came upstairs when
I was in bed I would dive under the bedclothes, as a duck dives under
water, and only come to the surface when he was gone. I am sure I never
kissed my father or climbed on to his knee, and that during his short