and still seem a really beautiful place.  It had all been elaborately laid out; there was a big lawn, low-lying, where there had once been a lake, shrubberies and winding walks, a ruinous building, with a classical portico, on the top of a wooded mound, a kitchen garden and paddocks for cows beyond; and on each side the walls and palings of other big mansions, all rather grand and mysterious.  And there within that little space my life was to be spent.

The only sight we ever had of the outer world was that we went on Sundays to an extraordinarily ugly and tasteless modern church, where the services were hideously performed; and occasionally we were allowed to go over to Richmond with a shilling or two of pocket-money to shop; and sometimes there were walks, a dozen boys with a good-natured master rambling about Richmond Park, with its forest clumps and its wandering herds of deer, all very dim and beautiful to me.

Very soon I settled in my own mind that it was a detestable place.  Yet I was never bullied or molested in any way.  The tone of the place was incredibly good; not one word or hint of moral evil did I ever hear there during the whole two years I spent there, so that I left the school as innocent as I had entered it.

But it was a place of terrors and solitude.  There were rules which one did not know, and might unawares break.  I did not, I believe, make a single real friend there.  I liked a few of the boys, but was wholly bent on guarding my inner life from everyone.  The work was always easy to me, the masters were good-natured and efficient.  But I lived entirely in dreams of the holidays—­home had become a distant heavenly place; and I recollect waking early in the summer mornings, hearing the scream of peacocks in a neighbouring pleasaunce, and thinking with a sickening disgust of the strict, ordered routine of the place, no one to care about, dull work to be done, nothing to enjoy or to be interested in.  There were games, but they were not much organised, and I seldom played them.  I wandered about in free times in the grounds, and the only times of delight that I recollect were when one buried oneself in a book in the library, and dived into imaginations.

The place was well managed; we were wholesomely fed; but there had grown up a strange kind of taboo about many of the things we were supposed to eat.  I had a healthy appetite, but the tradition was that all the food was unutterably bad, adulterated, hocussed.  The theory was that one must just eat enough to sustain life.  There was, for instance, an excellent tapioca pudding served on certain days; but no one was allowed to eat it.  The law was that it had to be shovelled into envelopes and afterwards cast away in the playground.  I do not know if the masters saw this—­it was never adverted upon—­and I did it ruefully enough.  The consequence was that one lived hungrily in the midst of plenty, and food became the one prepossession of life.