I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced the most fascinating measure; continually he played to us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchanting airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable rebuke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea we had committed. But it was never any joy in fault-finding that prompted it: the real cause was the watchfulness and responsibility of his love. How often our fear was ill-founded, passes enumeration, but one way or another, it had become a habit with all of us, except perhaps Nellie, for she, out of a remarkable faculty of not knowing at all what fear meant (except when playing Pirates) arrived at a much completer comprehension of my father than any of us.
Still less did the rest of us understand those fits of black depression which from time to time assailed and overwhelmed my father, not grasping the fact that when they were on him, he really ceased to be himself, and was under a sort of obsession. They were, I imagine, as purely physical as a cold in the head or an ache of indigestion, but during the two or three days that they lasted he was utterly unapproachable. He would sit through a meal, or take us out for a walk in a silence which if broken at all, was broken only by blame or irony. If we spoke to him, there would be no reply; if, under the intolerable heaviness we were silent, he would ask if there was nothing that interested us which he was worthy of hearing.... And all the time, as we knew later, he was struggling with this demoniacal load, longing to be rid of it, yearning to burst out of it, but possessed by it to the point of helplessness. While the fit was on him, and he was in this abnormal state, the most innocent of words and actions would evoke a formidable censure, and I suspect that three-quarters of our fear for him were derived from our belief that these attacks were a part of him, always there, and always liable to come into play. That was an entire mistake, though it was a natural one. As it was, these black fits were not incapsulated by us, but suffered to mingle with and make part of our estimate of him. That we should so have feared him, that we should so have made ourselves unnatural and formal with him, when all the time his love was streaming out towards us, makes a pathos so pitiful that I cannot bear to think of it. But there it was, and long it lasted, and all the time I never got a true perspective of him. We saw ourselves as a nervous row of pupils before a schoolmaster, and all the time it was his very strictness which was a manifestation of his love, and his love hungered for ours. Our troubles and our joys, the worst of us and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my mother, and she gave the same welcome to the one and to the other, and for ever treasured both.