word, and it helped him a great deal.

The worst of everything was that he had had a number of beatings lately and
the world could not possibly go on, as far as he was concerned, if he had
many more. Every beating made matters worse and his own desperate attempts
to be good and to merit rewards rather than chastisement met with no
success. The hopeless fact of it all was that it had very little to do with
his own actions; his father behaved in the same way to every one, and Mrs.
Trussit, the housekeeper, old Curtis the gardener, Aunt Jessie, and all
the servants, shook under his tongue and the cold glitter of his eyes, and
certainly the maids would long ago have given notice and departed were it
not that they were all afraid to face him. Peter knew that that was true,
because Mrs. Trussit had told him so. It was this hopeless feeling of
indiscriminate punishment that made everything so bad. Until he was eight
years old Peter had not been beaten at all, but when he was very young
indeed he had learnt to crawl away when he heard his father's step, and
he had never cried as a baby because his nurse's white scared face had
frightened him so. And then, of course, there was his mother, his poor
mother--that was another reason for silence. He never saw his mother for
more than a minute at a time because she was ill, had been ill for as long
as he could remember. When he was younger he had been taken into his
mother's room once or twice a week by Mrs. Trussit, and he had bent down
and kissed that white tired face, and he had smelt the curious smell in the
room of flowers and medicine, and he had heard his mother's voice, very far
away and very soft, and he had crept out again. When he was older his aunt
told him sometimes to go and see his mother, and he would creep in alone,
but he never could say anything because of the whiteness of the room and
the sense of something sacred like church froze his speech. He had never
seen his father and mother together.