As I have said before, I have always had an insurmountable instinct for keeping rules.  At school I could never bring myself to transgress, although I knew that transgression was the road to adventure.  So at the Shop, however much I may have wished to be in the swim, my instinct for the moral and religious code of home was too strong for me.  It required no self-control to prevent myself from slipping into blasphemy and filth.  On the contrary, in order to do so I should have had to violate my strongest instincts, and exercised a will to evil much stronger than any will power that I possessed at that time.  If, when I left Woolwich, I was comparatively pure, it was because nature did not allow me to be anything else.

To say the truth, I have never felt the sway of passions to anything like the same extent as most men seem to.  I have never cared for the society of women for its sexual attraction.  Consequently all my women friends have been just the same to me as my men friends—­friends whom I could talk to about the things that interested me.

I don’t boast of this, I only state the fact.  I am not proud of it because I know that some passion is necessary to make heroes and even saints.

SOME NOTES ON THE FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY “HILDA”

I have before me as I write a pencil sketch, limned with considerable care, of a rather disagreeable looking young man, and beneath it is written—­

  “D.W.A.H., by Himself.”

It is a profile.  The eye has almost disappeared under the brow, the mouth is tightly closed to a degree that is quite unpleasant and there is a deliberate exaggeration of a slight defect he actually had—­a tendency for the lower jaw to protrude a little.  This little defect hardly any of his friends seem to have noticed, for most of them execrate it as a libel in the otherwise admittedly beautiful photograph at the beginning of this volume.  The expression in the sketch is above all—­dubious.

So did Donald see himself.

For the rest of us no doubt the lessons Mr. Haselden has for us in his caricatures, “ourselves as we see ourselves” and “as others see us,” are necessary.  But not for Donald.  The drawing is pasted into an album which contains mainly Oxford College groups, and there is a certain unpleasant resemblance between it and his full face presentment in one of the groups—­in which he has “the group expression” rather badly.  Assuming it to have been drawn at Oxford, or not very long after he left, I think it must belong very nearly to a time when he was going off abroad on one of his long trips, and I had the sympathy of a dear old lady friend of ours on having to part with him.  I remember replying, “Yes, it always seems as if peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety went with him when he goes!” She laughed a good deal, and then said, seriously, repeating over to herself the stately mounting sixteenth century phrases, “But it’s quite true, you know!” I hardly think, though, that I should have said it of the young man in the sketch!