hat
direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be
discovered, no doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive and
revolutionary. She did not want to rediscover my father at all.

It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an idea
of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge's colonial
ascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open, I
thought, suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but
as for being gratified--!

I don't jeer now. I'm not so sure.

V

It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was
the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and take my
world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it and
a certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I believe,
was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a hard woman.

I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my father
is living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my distincter
memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her
indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never a
photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, I
know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented her
destroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep
of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of every
little personal thing she had of him. There must have been presents made
by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly inscriptions, letters
perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or such-like gage. She kept her
wedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed. She never
told me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of him; though
at times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of him--it isn't
much--I got from his brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her
ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in the very
bottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a private
school among the Kentish hills. You must not think I was always at
Bladesover--even in my holidays. If at the time these came round, Lady
Drew was vexed by recent Company, or for any other reason wished to take
it out of my mother, then she used to ignore the customary reminder my
mother gave her, and I "s