In addition to these, B. and I both had inseparable friends, who lived within a stone’s throw.  Ronnie was my alter ego till I was fourteen:  so much so that I had no other friend.  Even now, though our ways have kept us apart, and our interests and opinions are fundamentally different, we can sit in each other’s rooms with perfect content.  We know too much of each other for it to be possible to pretend to be what we are not.  We sit and are ourselves, naked and unashamed so to speak, and it is very restful.

Pictures float before my mind.  Let me select a few.  I see a rather fat, stolid little boy in a big airy nursery at the top of the house, sitting in the middle of the floor playing with bricks.  Outside it is gusty and wet, and the small boy hopes that he will be allowed to stay in all the afternoon, and play with bricks.  But that is not to be.  A small thin man, with gentle grey eyes, short curly beard, an old black greatcoat and a black square felt hat, comes in.  The child must have some air.  The child is resentful, but resigned, is wrapped up well, put in his pram and wheeled up and down the Madeira Road.

“Pa” didn’t appear very much except on some such errand; but “Ma” was in and out all the time.  “Ma” was everything, the only woman who has ever had my whole love, my whole trust and has made my heart ache with the desire to show my love.

A later picture.  The boy is bigger, and not so fat.  He no longer has a nurse.  He has vacated the nursery, which is now tenanted by his big sisters.  He has a little room all his own:  a very small room, looking west.  The south-west gales beat upon the window in the winter, and not so far away is the roar of the sea.  It is good to curl up in a nice warm little bed, and listen to the howling of the wind and the waves.

In the morning come lessons from his eldest sister G. The schoolroom has rings and a trapeze, a bookshelf full of boys’ books, and cupboards full of stone bricks, cannon and soldiers.  The boy’s mind is set on bricks and soldiers.  Lessons and walks with “Ma” and his sisters or Ronnie and his nurse down the town are a nuisance.  They interfere with the building of cathedrals and the settling of the destinies of nations by the arbitrament of war.

It was a stolid, placid boy, intensely wrapt up in his cathedrals and his generals, intensely devoted to “Ma,” and regarding all else as rather a nuisance.  Ronnie he liked.  He liked going to tea with him, and going walks with him and his nurse; but they didn’t have much in common except cricket.  Ronnie had big soldiers which could not be knocked down by cannon balls, and which couldn’t make history because they were few in number, and nearly all English.  Mine were of every European power, and many Asiatic ones.  They were diminutive and numerous, could take shelter in a forest of pine cones and were admirably suited to be mown down at the cannon’s mouth.  The King of England