A curious little dialogue is preserved by his aunt in a diary.  He laughed so immoderately at something that was said at lunch by one of his elders, that when his father inquired what the joke was, he was unable to answer.  “It must be something very funny,” said his mother in explanation.  “Arthur never laughs unless there is a joke.”  The little boy became grave at once, and said severely, “There’s hardly ever anything to laugh at in what you say; but I always laugh for fear people should be disappointed.”

He was very sensitive to rebuke.  “I am not so sensitive as I am always supposed to be,” he said to me once.  “I am one of those people who cry when they are spoken to, and do it again.”

For instance, he told me that, being very fond of music when he was small, he stole down one morning at six to play the piano.  His father, a very early riser, was disturbed by the gentle tinkling, and coming out of his study, asked him rather sharply why he couldn’t do something useful—­read some Shakespeare.  He never played on the piano again for months, and for years never until he had ascertained that his father was out.  “It was a mistake,” he told me once, apropos of it.  “If he had said that it disturbed him, but that I might do it later, I should have been delighted to stop.  I always liked feeling that I was obliging people.”

He disliked his father, and feared him.  The tall, handsome gentleman, accustomed to be obeyed, in reality passionately fond of his children, dismayed him.  He once wrote on a piece of paper the words, “I hate papa,” and buried it in the garden.

For the rest, he was an ordinary, rather clever, secretive child, speaking very little of his feelings, and caring, as he has told me since, very little for anybody except his nurse.  “I cared about her in a curious way.  I enjoyed the sensation of crying over imaginary evils; and I should not like to say how often in bed at night I used to act over in my mind an imaginary death-bed scene of my nurse, and the pathetic remarks she was to make about Master Arthur, and the edifying bearing I was to show.  This was calculated within a given time to produce tears, and then I was content.”

He went to a private school, which he hated, and then to Winchester, which he grew to love.  The interesting earnest little boy merged into the clumsy loose-jointed schoolboy, silent and languid.  There are hardly any records of this time.

“My younger sister died,” he told me, “when I was at school.  I experienced about ten minutes of grief; my parents were overwhelmed with anguish, and I can remember that, like a quick, rather clever child, I soon came to comprehend the sort of remark that cheered them, and almost overdid it in my zeal.  I am overwhelmed with shame,” he said, “whenever I look at my mother’s letters about that time when she speaks of the comfort I was to them.  It was a fraus pia, but it was a most downright fraus.”