CHAPTER III

It was a perfectly grand feeling---the feeling I had the next day and
have had every day since I got here--that I was in a place where there
wasn't a single member of my family to tell me not to do things I
wanted to do or to do what I did not want to do; and usually as I dress
in the morning I dance a new kind of highland fling which I made up for
times when I feel particularly happy. Everybody is well and Mother and
the girls are having a lovely time in a place where I would have had a
stupid one, being neither grown up nor a kid, but an in-betweener--too
young for some ages and not old enough for others; and here in
Twickenham Town I am as free as air, and Father is coming to see me as
often as he can. I can't let myself think much about Father or I would
take the train straight home.

I had begged him to let me stay with him, but neither he nor Mother
would agree. Just because I got the Grome medal at school they
imagined I had studied too hard and needed a quiet, restful summer in
the mountains; but I will never study too hard while on this little
planet called the earth. I got the medal because Billy said I'd never
sit still long enough to study for it, and just to show him he very
often does not know what he is talking about I made up my mind to get
it.

The only thing I ever expect to work hard over is one book. I am going
to write one book that the critics will call a Discovery. It is to be
dull and dry and dreary, and therefore it will be thought deep and