My aunt, I am sure, did her very best for me according to her lights, and perhaps she thought that I should settle all the sooner if I were left judiciously alone, but, looking back now upon her upbringing, I think she might have shown me more tenderness. She was a tall, handsome woman, with a capable manner, and what she called "sensible" views of life. If she had ever cherished any illusions, they had long ago worn down to the level of strict commonplace. Though she loved her children, in her practical, unsentimental way, they were to her always "the children", to be ruled and reared, clothed and educated, but never in any respect her companions; and a friendship between two people of widely differing ages, such as existed between my father and myself, was a thing she could scarcely understand. There were certain well-arranged regulations for our daily life and conduct, and that any allowance should be made for individual temperament was to her mind neither suitable nor desirable. She treated me as one of her own, and that it was possible for me to need more did not enter into her calculations. But I did need more. I was a child of extremely warm affections, and though I could not have expressed the feeling, my heart felt starved upon the very small amount of love and attention which fell to my share. I tried my best to be brave and not to fret, but sometimes my home-sickness would gain the upper hand, and I have often wet my pillow with bitter tears, longing with a yearning that was almost agony for one kiss from my father before I went to sleep. With my cousins I was soon a favourite. "Tell us again about San Carlos, and the forest, and the tree-witches, and the gri-gri man," said Edgar and Mary, who listened spell-bound to my reminiscences of Tasso's marvellous stories; and I would sit in the dusk by the nursery fire, with an audience of eager little faces around me, putting such horrible realism into my narratives that Donald brought Blair from her supper by screaming that the gri-gri man was under his bed, while poor Mary never dared in future to pass the lumber-room door, for fear of seeing a grinning goblin pop his head suddenly out of the darkness. Though we afterwards became the best of friends, Lucy treated me at first with little airs of superiority and patronage. I am afraid we began our acquaintance with a wordy war. "You must feel quite glad to be in a proper English house, after living in that queer foreign place," she remarked, by way of opening the conversation. "No, I'm not," I retorted. "Our house at San Carlos is ever so much nicer than this. It has marble floors, and a terrace, and a pergola."