ain. But I
used to wonder. Why was the doctor so happy and the little canon so
unhappy, the doctor so successful, the canon so unsuccessful? I
decided that the great thing was to be satisfied with oneself. I
determined that I would be satisfied with myself. Well, of course I
never was--never have been. Something wouldn't let me alone. The key
to the door, perhaps ... everything was shut up inside me, and at
last I began to wonder whether there was anything there at all. When
at nineteen I went to Cambridge I was very unhappy. Whilst I was there
my mother died. I came back to the little bow-windowed house and lived
with my father. I was quite alone in the world."

In spite of myself I had a little movement of impatience.

"How self-centred the man is! As though his case were at all peculiar!
Wants shaking up and knocking about."

He seemed to know my thought.

"You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I
thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that
little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read--I used to sit in
the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I'd walk in
the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, wonder about
people and I grew more and more frightened of talking, of meeting
people, of little local dinner-parties. It was as though I were on one
side of the river and they were all on the other. I would think
sometimes how splendid it would be if I could cross--but I couldn't
cross. Every year it became more impossible!"

"You wanted some one to take you out of yourself," I said, and then
shuddered at my own banality. But he took me very seriously.

"I did. Of course," he answered. "But who would bother? They all
thought me impossible. The girls all laughed at me--my own cousins.
Sometimes people tried to help me. They never went far enough. They
gave me up too soon."

"He evidently thinks he was worth a lot of trouble," I thought
irritably. But suddenly he laughed.

"That same doctor one day spoke of me, not knowing that I was near
him; or perhaps he knew and thought it would be good for me. 'Oh,
Trenchard,' he said. 'He ought to be in a nunnery ... and he'd be
quite safe, too. _He'd_ never cause a scandal!' They thought of me as
something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he
died, he said: 'I'd like to have had a son!' He never noticed me at
his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him."