ye would light on me, and he would make me stand up and tell me it
was a scandal I was so idle when all the world knew that any Irish boy was
cleverer than a whole class-room of English boys, a description I had to
pay for afterwards. Sometimes he would call up a little boy who had a
girl's face and kiss him upon both cheeks and talk of taking him to Greece
in the holidays, and presently we heard he had written to the boy's
parents about it, but long before the holidays he was dismissed.

VII

Two pictures come into my memory. I have climbed to the top of a tree by
the edge of the playing field, and am looking at my school-fellows and am
as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise. I
am saying to myself, "if when I grow up I am as clever among grown-up men
as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man." I remind myself how
they think all the same things and cover the school walls at election
times with the opinions their fathers find in the newspapers. I remind
myself that I am an artist's son and must take some work as the whole end
of life and not think as the others do of becoming well off and living
pleasantly. The other picture is of a hotel sitting-room in the Strand,
where a man is hunched up over the fire. He is a cousin who has speculated
with another cousin's money and has fled from Ireland in danger of arrest.
My father has brought us to spend the evening with him, to distract him
from the remorse my father knows that he must be suffering.

VIII

For years Bedford Park was a romantic excitement. At North End my father
had announced at breakfast that our glass chandelier was absurd and was to
be taken down, and a little later he described the village Norman Shaw was
building. I had thought he said, "there is to be a wall round and no
newspapers to be allowed in." And when I had told him how put out I was at
finding neither wall nor gate, he explained that he had merely described
what ought to be. We were to see De Morgan tiles, peacock-blue doors and
the pomegranate pattern and the tulip pattern of Morris, and to discover
that we had always hated doors painted with imitation grain and the roses
of mid-Victoria, and tiles covered with geometrical patterns that seemed
to have been shaken out of a muddy kaleidoscope. We went to live in a
house like those we had seen in pictures and even met people dressed like
people in the storybooks. The streets were not straight and dull as