As a child the one thing I was afraid of was the possibility of my father’s displeasure.  We did not see a great deal of him, because he was a much occupied headmaster; and he was to me a stately and majestic presence, before whom the whole created world seemed visibly to bow.  But he was deeply anxious about our upbringing, and had a very strong sense of his responsibility; and he would sometimes reprove us rather sternly for some extremely trifling thing, the way one ate one’s food, or spoke, or behaved.  This descended upon me as a cloud of darkness; I attempted no excuses, I did not explain or defend myself; I simply was crushed and confounded.  I do not think it was the right method.  He never punished us, but we were not at ease with him.  I remember the agony with which I heard a younger sister once repeat to him some silly and profane little jokes which a good-natured and absurd old lady had told us in the nursery.  I felt sure he would disapprove, as he did.  I knew quite well in my childish mind that it was harmless nonsense, and did not give us a taste for ungodly mirth.  But I could not intervene or expostulate.  I am sure that my father had not the slightest idea how weighty and dominant he was; but many of the things he rebuked would have been better not noticed, or if noticed only made fun of, while I feel that he ought to have given us more opportunity of stating our case.  He simply frightened me into having a different morality when I was in his presence to what I had elsewhere.  But he did not make me love goodness thereby, and only gave me a sense that certain things, harmless in themselves, must not be done or said in the presence of papa.  He did not always remember his own rules, and there was thus an element of injustice in his rebukes, which one merely accepted as part of his awful and unaccountable greatness.

When I was transferred to a private school, a great big place, very well managed in every way, I lived for a time in atrocious terror of everything and everybody.  I was conscious of a great code of rules which I did not know or understand, which I might quite unwittingly break, and the consequences of which might be fatal.  I was never punished or caned, nor was I ever bullied.  But I simply effaced myself as far as possible, and lived in dread of disaster.  The thought even now of certain high blank walls with lofty barred windows, the remembered smells of certain passages and corners, the tall form and flashing eye of our headmaster and the faint fragrance of Havana cigars which hung about him, the bare corridors with their dark cupboards, the stone stairs and iron railings—­all this gives me a far-off sense of dread.  I can give no reason for my unhappiness there; but I can recollect waking in the early summer mornings, hearing the screams of peacocks from an adjoining garden, and thinking with a dreadful sense of isolation and despair of all the possibilities of disaster that lay hid in the day.  I am sure it was not a wholesome experience.  One need not fear the world more than is necessary—­but my only dream of peace was the escape to the delights of home, and the thought of the larger world was only a thing that I shrank from and shuddered at.