He remembered his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father.

He remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night, in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his passion with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another self saw and approved.
Then came school-days.

His father had sent him to an old endowed school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under discipline.

There he had received a plain commercial education, together with some Latin and Greek.

His quick, restless mind had soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well knew, he had done nothing supremely well.