She had known no other man, and so she could not tell that they were not all like that. But, as the years had passed, she had begun to wonder. She had asked Miss Minns whether everybody could make animals come when they whistled, and Miss Minns had admitted that the gift was unusual, that, in fact, she didn’t know anyone else who could do it. But Janet was growing old enough now to realise that Miss Minns’ experience was limited and that she did not know everything. She herself had tried to attract the birds, but they had never come to her. Her father’s fury had seemed to her like the wind or rain; something that came to him suddenly, blowing from no certain place, and something, too, for which he was not responsible. She learnt to know that they only lasted a short time, and she used to hide herself until they were over. With all this she did not love him. He gave her very little opportunity of doing so. His affection was as strangely fierce as his temper and frightened her almost as badly. She felt that that too was outside himself, that he had no love for her personally, but felt as he did about the animals, about anything young and wild. It was this last characteristic that was strangest of all to her. It was very difficult to put it into words, but she had seen that nothing made him so furious as the conventional people of the town. She was too young to recognise what it was about them that made him so angry, but she had seen him grow pale with rage at some insignificant thing that some one had said or done. On the other hand, he liked the wildest people of the place, the fishermen and tramps that haunted the lower quarters of the town. All this she grasped very vaguely, because she had no standard of comparison; she knew no one else. But fear had made love impossible; she was frightened when he was fond of her, she was frightened when he was angry with her. Miss Minns, too, was a difficult person to bestow love upon. She did not want it, and indeed resolutely flung it back with the remark that emotion was bad for growing girls and interfered with their education. When she lived at all she lived in the past, and Janet was only a very dim shadowy reflexion of the Misses Crate, Devonshire, and Simpson, who had glorified her earlier years.