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.
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.
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