No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, but how few they seemed and how clearly they stand out!  I did not make friends among the boys; they were pleasant enough acquaintances, some of them, but not to be trusted or confided in; they had to be kept at arm’s length, and one’s real life guarded and hoarded away from them; because if one told them anything about one’s home or one’s ideas, it might be repeated, and the sacred facts shouted in one’s ears as taunts and jests.  But there was a little bluff master, a clergyman, with shaggy rippled red-brown hair and a face like a pug-dog.  He was kind to me, and had me to lunch one Sunday in a villa out at Barnes—­that was a breath of life, to sit in a homelike room and look at old Punches half the afternoon; and there was another young man, a master, rather stout and pale, with whom I shared some little jokes, and who treated me as he might treat a younger brother; he was pledged, I remember, to give me a cake if I won an Eton Scholarship, and royally he redeemed his promise.  He died of heart disease a little while after I left the school.  I had promised to write to him from Eton and never did so, and I had a little pang about that when I heard of his death.  And then there was the handsome loud-voiced maid of my dormitory, Underwood by name, who was always just and kind, and who, even when she rated us, as she did at times, had always something human beckoning from her handsome eye.  I can see her now, with her sleeves tucked up, and her big white muscular arms, washing a refractory little boy who fought shy of soap and water.  I had a wild idea of giving her a kiss when I went away, and I think she would have liked that.  She told me I had always been a good boy, and that she was sorry that I was going; but I did not dare to embrace her.

And then there was dear Louisa, the matron of the little sanatorium on the Mortlake road.  She had been a former housemaid of ours; she was a strong sturdy woman, with a deep voice like a man, and when I arrived there ill—­I was often ill in those days—­she used to hug and kiss me and even cry over me; and the happiest days I spent at school were in that poky little house, reading in Louisa’s little parlour, while she prepared some special dish as a treat for my supper; or sitting hour by hour at the window of my room upstairs, watching a grocer opposite set out his window.  I certainly did love Louisa with all my heart; and it was almost pleasant to be ill, to be welcomed by her and petted and made much of.  “My own dear boy,” she used to say, and it was music in my ears.

I feel on looking back that, if I had children of my own, I should study very carefully to avoid any sort of terrorism.  Psychologists tell us that the nervous shocks of early years are the things that leave indelible marks throughout life.  I believe that mental specialists often make a careful study of the dreams of those whose minds are afflicted, because it is held that dreams very often continue