conventions of society, never occurred to him. Occasionally some old
friend of his would drop in, or some young admirer who had followed his
scientific work in the press would write asking permission to call and
consult him on some point. They were always received with cordiality, and
my father would take much trouble to be of any assistance he could to
them. We children used generally to be present on such occasions, and
frequently would join in the conversation, and thus we got to know various
people, among whom foreigners and various types of cranks were fairly in
evidence.

We lived in a large old-fashioned house in Fitzroy Square where our
father had settled down somewhere in the seventies soon after his marriage
to a South American Spaniard, whom he had met during a scientific research
expedition in Brazil. She was a girl of seventeen, his junior by some
twenty years. During his journeys into the interior of Brazil he had
fallen seriously ill with malarial fever, and had been most kindly taken
in and nursed by a coffee-planter and his family. Here he had met his
future wife who was acting as governess. She was of Spanish descent, and
combined the passionate enthusiasm of a Southerner with the independence
and self-reliance which life in a new and only partially civilised country
breeds. She was an orphan and penniless, but our father fell in love with
her, attracted doubtless by her beauty and vivaciousness in such striking
contrast with his bookish way of life, and he married her and brought her
home to London. He truly loved her and was a good husband in all essential
respects, but the uncongenial climate and monotonous life told on her
health, and she died three years after my birth, much mourned by her
husband, who plunged all the more deeply into scientific research, his
only other thought being a care for our education. He had lived on in the
same old house which grew somewhat dingier and shabbier each year, whilst
the neighbourhood fell from its pristine respectability to become the