very likely did not detect one of its really distinguishing
qualities. As to the early religious pictures of the Italian
school, I cared nothing either for subject or treatment, and would
have given a cartload of them for a drawing by Hunt of a bird's
nest. Wanting an ear for music and an eye for pictorial merit, I
believed, or affected to believe, that the raptures of people who
possessed the ear and eye were a sham. It irritated me to hear my
aunt play, although she had been well taught in her youth and was a
skilful performer. I know she would have liked to feel that she
gave me some pleasure, and that her playing was admired, but I was
so openly indifferent to it that at last she always shut the piano
if I happened to come into the room while she was practising. I
remember saying to her when she was talking to me about one of
Mozart's quartets she had just heard, that music was immoral,
inasmuch as it provoked such enormous insincerity. It is strange
that, although spite was painful to me, especially towards her, I
could not help indulging in it.

My failings gradually wrought in me confirmed bitterness. I
persuaded myself that the interest which people appeared to take in
me was mere polite pretence. There may be enough selfishness in the
world to explain misanthropy, but there is never enough to justify
it, and what we imagine to be indifference to us is often merely the
reserve caused by our own refusal to surrender ourselves to
legitimate and generous emotions. Oddly enough, I frequently made
hasty and spasmodic offers of intimate friendship to people who were
not prepared for them, and the natural absence of immediate response
was a further reason for scepticism. A man to whom I was suddenly
impelled was in want of money, and I pressed ten pounds upon him.
He could not pay me at the appointed time, whereupon I set him down