He turned away his head. Perhaps if I had better appreciated his grief, I should have suffered less, in my corner, from thinking myself forgotten. But as he controlled himself, I was free to torment myself to my heart’s content. My sister was going away to carry out her own idea, as grandfather had said, whereas I was being sent to prison. I quite forgot that I had myself asked to be sent. But had I not been a prisoner already, at our house? And in my rebellion, working myself up with the thought of Nazzarena on the high road, the sun shining through her hair and her teeth parted in her smile, I repeated to myself the phrase which chimed with the movement of the train, “I want to be free! I want to be free!” BOOK IV I THE EPIDEMIC I WAS being prepared for liberty by years of seclusion, the history of which, after so many petty rebellions, I shall not set down here. I never became wonted to that boarding school to which I had demanded to be sent in a moment of pride which for nothing in the world would I have disavowed. Yet I passed for a good scholar, whose only fault was a little reserve or dissimulation. I suffered frightfully during the first absence from home. I used to cry in the dormitory, my head smothered in the covers, until I fell asleep, enwrapped in my sorrow. But I never uttered a word of complaint. My parents no doubt thought that I had accepted my new life without difficulty. My father wrote to me regularly and at length: no doubt this correspondence made an addition to his burdens for which I was not in the least obliged to him. Self love urged me to repel all his advances. Knowing nothing of Martinod’s insinuations, how should he have guessed that I saw on every side injustice to myself, marks of preference for my brothers? I systematically distorted phrases, sentiments, thoughts. If, in his virile love, he avoided expressions of affection, for fear of softening me, I accused him of harshness. If on the other hand he gave way to his fondness for me, it was simply to deceive me, and impose all the more upon me an authority which I exaggerated to the point of imagining that it was everywhere about me, an imagined persecution which became unsupportable. I usually wrote to my mother, and he never remarked upon the fact. Yet he noticed it, and several of his letters showed that he did. “I know,” he once wrote, “that you do not care to confide in your father.” And mother, who had also noticed it, missed no opportunity of writing about him, emphasising his kindness of heart above all his other merits, reminding me of instances of it, which exasperated me. If he had become aware of my purposed and tenacious hostility, he had no suspicion of its cause; and so the chasm which in the beginning a single step might easily have crossed, grew ever wider between us.