第20章

"Tell me your relations with your father.""We were most constant companions.My mother - she and my father- they were not altogether companionable - in short, they were ill-mated, and, being wise enough to find it out, and having no desire to longer embitter each other's lives, they agreed to separate when I was only four.They parted without the slightest ill-feeling, and I remained with father.He was very fond of me, and would permit no one else to teach me.At seven I was drawing and painting under his guidance.At eight the violin was put into my hands and my studies in voice began.In the meantime father was most careful not to neglect my physical training; he taught me the use of Indian clubs, and how to walk easily.At eight I could walk four miles an hour without fatigue.The neighbours used to urge that I be put to school, but my father would reply - many a time I have heard him say it - 'a child's brain is like a flower that blossoms in perceptions and goes to seed in abstractions.Correct concepts are the raw material ofreason.Every desk in your school is an intellectual loom which is expected to weave a sound fabric out of rotten raw material.While your children are wasting their fibre in memorising the antique errors of classical thought my child is being fitted to perceive new truths for herself.' It is needless to say his friends considered these views altogether too radical.But for all that I was never sent to school.My father's library was always at my disposal, and I was taught how to use it.We were constantly together, and grew so into each other's lives that " - but her voice failed her, and her eyes moistened.Maitland, though he apparently did not notice her emotion, so busy was he in making notes, quickly put a question which diverted her attention.

"Your father seemed last night to have a presentiment of some impending calamity.Was this a common experience?""Of late, yes.He has told me some six or seven times of dreaming the same dreams - a dream in which some assassin struck him out of the darkness." "Did you at any of these times notice anything which might now lead you to believe this fancied repetition was the result of any mental malady?""No."