yet we never became really intimate. I felt that the old conflict was
being carried on under conditions that were much harder for me. He had
parted me from my mother and now that I stood alone, would vanquish me.
He surely did not suspect that I would understand it thus and would
consciously carry on the strife. But though I did not reason it out, my
intuition clearly apprehended his tactics, and I held out more
obstinately than ever with all the stubbornness of a child and the
strength of mind which I had from himself inherited.

On three types of humanity my father was not to be approached. Firstly,
the priests, the black ones, as he called them, whom he hated with all
the fierce vehemence of his race; and, in spite of me, he so
successfully inculcated into me his own aversion, that I cannot yet
unexpectedly behold a priestly robe without a sensation of shuddering
as at the sight of a snake. Secondly, the bourgeois, whom he called
philistines, - the humbly living, contented, narrow-minded, timid, -
whom he did not hate as much as he despised them with fervid scorn. And
finally women, whom he neither hated nor despised, but whom he feared
with a scoffing dread.

And now, looking back upon my youth from so great a distance, now I
understand that it was not only healthy, natural tenderness that drove
him to such exaggerated care for me, but bitter, impassioned feelings
of opposition and revenge born of mortifying and painful experience.
Priests, women and philistines had been too mighty or too cunning for
him; now he would at least keep me, his successor in the world, out of
their hands. That was the one great satisfaction he still sought in
life, more from grudge against his enemies than for love of me.

Besides there were inconsistencies in his character that I am now quite