love to a girl when I was ten years old." He laughed to himself at the
remembrance. "Her father had a foundry. She used to wear a red dress,
I remember, and her hair was brown. She sang like a little lark. I was
half mad about her; and yet I knew that I didn't really love her. Still,
I told her that I did. I suppose it was the cursed falseness of my whole
nature. I know that whenever I have said most, and felt most, something
in me kept saying all the time: 'You're lying, you're lying, you're
lying!' Was I born a liar?

I wonder if the first words I ever spoke were a lie? I wonder, when I
kissed my mother first, and knew that I was kissing her, if the same
little devil that sits up in my head now, said then: 'You're lying,
you're lying, you're lying.' It has said so enough times since. I loved
to be with my mother; yet I never felt, even when she died--and God knows
I felt bad enough then!

I never felt that my love was all real. It had some infernal note of
falseness somewhere, some miserable, hollow place where the sound of my
own voice, when I tried to speak the truth, mocked me! I wonder if the
smiles I gave, before I was able to speak at all, were only blarney?
I wonder, were they only from the wish to stand well with everybody,
if I could? It must have been that; and how much I meant, and how much
I did not mean, God alone knows!

"What a sympathy I have always had for criminals! I have always wanted,
or, anyhow, one side of me has always wanted, to do right, and the other
side has always done wrong. I have sympathised with the just, but I have
always felt that I'd like to help the criminal to escape his punishment.
If I had been more real with that girl in New York, I wonder whether she
wouldn't have stuck to me? When I was with her I could always convince