Already my parents were unhappy together. Mary--I call her so here for convenience, but she would never have tolerated it in reality--Mary, although really affectionate and impressionable, was fundamentally insincere, with herself and with everybody else. She lived entirely on the emotional plane, and when genuine emotions were not forthcoming she faked them by instinct. Her mother, who belonged to the same type, although with more strength of character, and far less capacity for affection, had always played up to her. They had their violent disputes and violent reconciliations--neither could have been happy without--but they did respect one another’s poses. But my father never played up. He couldn’t. Worse still, if he could have done so, he wouldn’t--on principle. Again I can’t remember, but I can imagine, almost to the point of certainty, short and searing passages between my parents. “Robert, I want you not to ask me to play the piano to-night.” (He so seldom gave her an opening, that she had to force them.) “Off colour?” “It isn’t that. I heard to-day that Mrs. Thorndyke’s child is dead. It--it upset me.” “But you didn’t know the child.” “I know Katherine Thorndyke.” “You’ve met her once or twice, I remember. And didn’t we hear that if the poor child had lived, it must have been an idiot?” Probably, at that stage, my mother burst into tears. She’d been heading for that, of course, although she didn’t know it consciously. But my father did, and had made her aware that he did, in a rather brutal fashion. That was the way they reacted on one another. It was better, after grandmother came. Curiously enough, my father liked her, although she and Mary had so many of the same characteristics. But I think he regarded her as a sort of lightning conductor. For Mary herself, however, it was different. Like so many people who manufacture continual unhappiness for themselves, she had a frantic craving for happiness, and an irrational conviction that happiness was her due. She told me herself, long afterwards, that she never had any thought of infidelity towards my father, nor did she ever meet any man who could or would have caused her to break her marriage vows. But--and this she didn’t tell me, it’s part of the reconstruction--she was constantly obsessed by a vague and romantic expectation of some such encounter. I imagine that she could not believe the world to have been created without a special application to her yearnings. And then undoubtedly the nervous wear and tear that she imposed upon herself, and upon us all, told on her spirits. Her scenes with grandmother, although they may have served as a safety-valve, were too frequent. They may also have served to throw into painful contrast her husband’s stolid opposition to any form of emotional stimulus. However that may be, grandmother had formed part of our household for rather less than a year, when Mary suddenly ran away.