The way in which
he had taught me had prevented my feeling any dislike for study; I
therefore stuck fairly well to my books, while not neglecting the games
which are so important a part of healthy education. Everything went well
with me, both as regards masters and school-fellows; nevertheless, I was
declared to be of a highly nervous and imaginative temperament, and the
school doctor more than once urged our headmaster not to push me forward
too rapidly--for which I have ever since held myself his debtor.
Early in 1890, I being then home from Oxford (where I had been entered in
the preceding year), my mother died; not so much from active illness, as
from what was in reality a kind of _maladie du pays_. All along she had
felt herself an exile, and though she had borne up wonderfully during my
father's long struggle with adversity, she began to break as soon as
prosperity had removed the necessity for exertion on her own part.
My father could never divest himself of the feeling that he had wrecked
her life by inducing her to share her lot with his own; to say that he
was stricken with remorse on losing her is not enough; he had been so
stricken almost from the first year of his marriage; on her death he was
haunted by the wrong he accused himself--as it seems to me very
unjustly--of having done her, for it was neither his fault nor hers--it
was Ate.
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