my agony any longer, my father was obliged, with the deepest reluctance, to confine himself to a separate bedroom. But it was in this extremity that his almost Quixotic unselfishness shone if possible with an added lustre. From the time of his marriage to the day of my birth, and as soon thereafter as the doctor had permitted her to rise, my father had been in the habit of enabling my mother to provide him with an early cup of tea. And this he had done by waking her regularly a few minutes before six o’clock. In view of the fact, however, that he was now occupying a different bedroom, and that, owing to my indisposition, she was awake most of the night, he offered to excuse her should she chance to be asleep at that hour, from the performance of this wifely duty. Needless to say, it was not an offer that she could accept. Indeed, in his heart he had not expected her to do so. And I have even considered the incident, in later days, as illustrative of a certain weakness in my father’s character. But I have never been able to regard it without affection or to forbear mentioning it on appropriate occasions.

That in most respects, however, my father’s temperament was an exceptionally unflinching one was amply corroborated by the circumstances attendant upon the choice of my second godfather. This gave rise, as my father has frequently told me, to the most prolonged and anxious discussions, and entailed an enormous amount of correspondence, some of which has been preserved among the family documents. For with his ruthless determination, inherited by myself, to discover and expose every kind of wrong-doing, with his life-long habit of informing those in authority of any dereliction of duty in themselves and their subordinates, and with the passion for truth that compelled him on every occasion instantly to correct what he deemed the reverse, my father had necessarily but little leisure to cultivate the easy art of friendship. Amongst his acquaintances, indeed, there were but few that even remotely approximated to his standards; and he had found none that his conscience had permitted him to select for the purposes of personal friendship.

It was for this reason that, on the occasion of his marriage, he had dispensed with the services of a best man. And although the vicar had eventually agreed to act as one of my male sponsors, the appointment of a second began to assume the proportions of an almost insoluble problem. It being manifestly impossible to hope for a suitable candidate among such persons as occasionally called at the house, and my father’s character having long ago isolated him from his more immediate masculine relatives, he resolved at last to 

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