From as early a time as I can remember, I had no very clear consciousness of anything external to myself; I never realised that others had the right to expect from me any return for the kindness which they might show me or refuse to me, at their choice. I existed, others also existed; but between us there was an impassable gulf, and I had rarely any desire to cross it. I was very fond of my mother, but I felt no affection towards any one else, nor any desire for the affection of others. To be let alone, and to live my own life for ever, that was what I wanted; and I raged because I could never entirely escape from the contact of people who bored me and things which depressed me. If people called, I went out of the room before they were shown in; if I had not time to get away, I shook hands hurriedly, and slipped out as soon as I could. I remember a cousin who used to come to tea every Sunday for two or three years. My aversion to her was so great that I could hardly answer her if she spoke to me, and I used to think of Shelley, and how he too, like me, would 'lie back and languish into hate.' The woman was quite inoffensive, but I am still unable to see her or hear her speak without that sickness of aversion which used to make the painfulness of Sunday more painful. People in general left me no more than indifferent; they could be quietly avoided. They meant no more to me than the chairs on which they sat; I was untouched by their fortunes; I was unconscious of my human relationship to them. To my mother every person in the world became, for the moment of contact, the only person in the world; if she merely talked with any one for five minutes she was absorbed to the exclusion of every other thought; she saw no one else, she heard nothing else. I watched her, with astonishment, with admiration; I felt that she was in the right and I in the wrong; that she gained a pleasure and conferred a benefit, while I only wearied myself and offended others; but I could not help it. I felt nothing, I saw nothing, outside myself. I always had a room upstairs, which I called my study, where I could sit alone, reading or thinking. No one was allowed to enter the room; only, in winter, as I always let the fire go out, my mother would now and then steal in gently without speaking, and put more coals on the fire. I used to look up from my books furiously, and ask why I could not be left alone; my mother would smile, say nothing, and go out as quietly as she had come in. I was only happy when I was in my study, but, when I had shut the door behind me, I forgot all about the tedious people who were calling downstairs, the covers of the book I was reading seemed to broaden out into an enclosing rampart, and I was alone with myself.