and thinking with a dreadful sense of isolation and despair of all
the possibilities of disaster that lay hid in the day. I am sure it
was not a wholesome experience. One need not fear the world more
than is necessary--but my only dream of peace was the escape to
the delights of home, and the thought of the larger world was only
a thing that I shrank from and shuddered at.

No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, but how few they seemed
and how clearly they stand out! I did not make friends among the
boys; they were pleasant enough acquaintances, some of them, but
not to be trusted or confided in; they had to be kept at arm's
length, and one's real life guarded and hoarded away from them;
because if one told them anything about one's home or one's ideas,
it might be repeated, and the sacred facts shouted in one's ears as
taunts and jests. But there was a little bluff master, a clergyman,
with shaggy rippled red-brown hair and a face like a pug-dog. He
was kind to me, and had me to lunch one Sunday in a villa out at
Barnes--that was a breath of life, to sit in a homelike room and
look at old Punches half the afternoon; and there was another young
man, a master, rather stout and pale, with whom I shared some
little jokes, and who treated me as he might treat a younger
brother; he was pledged, I remember, to give me a cake if I won an
Eton Scholarship, and royally he redeemed his promise. He died of
heart disease a little while after I left the school. I had
promised to write to him from Eton and never did so, and I had a
little pang about that when I heard of his death. And then there
was the handsome loud-voiced maid of my dormitory, Underwood by
name, who was always just and kind, and who, even when she rated
us, as she did at times, had always something human beckoning from
her handsome eye. I can see her now, with her sleeves tucked up,