that he would gain anything by moving west. My mother disliked what
she saw of Kensington and Bayswater, and they thought in their
simplicity that places with names like Mildmay Park, Finsbury Park, and
finally Oakleigh Park, were good enough to begin on. Each move was a
little further out, a little bigger house and a little higher rent until
at Oakleigh Park, when I was six years old, it was a big semi-detached
villa, with a garden and tennis-lawn and professional people for
neighbours. That year my brother was born and my father began to die.

"You will laugh, I suppose, at the folly of it, but in her own way, my
mother was setting up to be a fine lady. We had a cook and housemaid,
and a nurse for me, and fine things I learned from her! We had a hired
landau on Saturday afternoon to go drives in, a pew in the church, and
sometimes people to dinner. She even got my father to send to Dublin to
find out the Carville ancestry and coat-of-arms. She did, that's a fact!
So you see, she understood perfectly what was meant in England by
keeping up a position. As I said, if my father had not got a sort of
mania for turning his money over, the scheme might have gone through.

"He began to die when I was not quite six, and he went on dying and at
the same time investing money until I was nearly eight. Imagine it! A
great big man, as irritable as a child, slowly rotting away inside with
cancer and two helpless little children, one a baby. All the time it was
doctor after doctor, each one recommending a different cure; all the
time it was investment after investment, the estate getting more and
more entangled. He went to Baden one autumn and came home worse. He
tried Harrogate in the spring, but it was no use. He came back, went to
bed and never rose from it. Mind you, all the time the cancer was eating
his body, this other cancer was at his mind. He plunged into the
craziest schemes for getting twenty per cent. interest. Nothing my
mother could say was able to make him see the madness of it. She wanted
him to buy land, but he said no one but a fool would buy land unless
they had a fortune to keep it up. At last, one January, it was over and
done with. He died, and we had a grand funeral, and the real business of
life began for us.

"For me it took a shape that I never got used to for all the years I was
kept at it--school. For the life of me I can't see what use it was to me
or to anyone else. What does a child learn at school th