discovered, no doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive and
revolutionary. She did not want to rediscover my father at all.

It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an idea
of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge's colonial
ascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open, I
thought, suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but
as for being gratified--!

I don't jeer now. I'm not so sure.

V

It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was
the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and take my
world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it and
a certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I believe,
was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a hard woman.

I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my father
is living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my distincter
memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her
indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never a
photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, I
know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented her
destroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep
of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of every
little personal thing she had of him. There must have been presents made
by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly inscriptions, letters