Thus all the seeds dropped during my convalescence were germinating in me after the lapse of a few years. I was free within myself, and no one suspected it. My parents were satisfied with my conduct and my place in school. I had the reputation of being quiet, obedient and easy to manage, and under the shelter of that reputation I let myself glide peacefully into a happy state in which I recognised no other law than my own and which was pretty near to anarchy. I made sacrifices to contingencies, but they courted for little in comparison with my inward joys. When I went home for vacations my coldness and indifference surprised and saddened my family. Unable to understand them, they attributed them to humility, to the reserve which was characteristic of me, and they multiplied efforts to bring me back to natural ways--only to make me all the more distant. The laugh of Louise, who was now the flower of the house, was as powerless to thaw me out as the martial exhortations of Bernard, at home on leave, which simply exasperated me. As for the two younger children, Nicola and Jamie, I inspired in them a sort of fear, so that they avoided me. After having alienated them, there was nothing for me but to be vexed at their bad dispositions, which I was not slow to do. Aunt Deen, seeking for a flattering explanation of my changed humour, discovered this: “He is so superior!” When my father got hold of me, with a little time to spare, he tried all means to resume the conversation that we had had on the hill of Malpas, that election day. With a secret disquietude which I felt, and which in a spirit of opposition only anchored me the more firmly in my attitude, he saw that I had closed my eyes to all that pertained to the field of observation, whether it were history, the past, tradition, laws, manners and customs, or practical every-day life, and confined myself to abstract reading, philosophy, mathematics, or threw myself still more absorbingly into music--an ambiguous and undefined régime, the mirages of which he dreaded for me. Deeply affected by the departure of Mélanie and Stephen and the approaching absence of Bernard, who was at home merely for a few months before setting out for his destination in Tonkin, where the war seemed likely to be unending, he had hoped to talk intimately with me, to win me back, to guide me. I would listen to him courteously, hardly replying, and he could not misunderstand my silence and my distant manner. He never wearied in pointing out to me the superiority which in every profession, in all the course of human existence, is conferred by a clear vision of realities. How much intelligence, tact, even diplomacy, he must have expended in that effort to win me back which I constantly evaded, I now realise as I recall it all.