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MY SECRET LIFE I was so demure and quiet in talk about women always, and had kept myself so circumspectly, that my mother never had the least suspicion of me,—but in all matters of love and intrigue, mother always seemed to me as innocent as the babe unborn.

For all that, my mother just then, and to my dismay, seeing that my little games would be much interfered with, said I better change my room, and have one on the ﬁrst ﬂoor. Mrs. *** had remarked, that being a man now I ought not to sleep on the servants’ ﬂoor. “As you please,—it’s one ﬂight of stairs less for me, but Mrs. *** is a fool,” I cried. “And which room?” “Your sister’s. Annie will always be with her aunt adopted, and Jane is only at home in the holidays.” But I would not be pushed into a small room; where was my tub to stand? Where my books? I must have the spare room. There was much altercation, I made my mother cry by saying that when of age I would get chambers away from her, and into the spare room I moved.

It was next to my mother’s. Installed there I did nothing but complain of its inconvenience. I smoked incessantly in it. The smell got into mother’s bedroom, and she could not bear tobacco smoke. I made a noise when she was in bed,—that annoyed her. I did all in a quiet way to make her as uncomfortable as possible. An uncle and aunt who stopped with us when in town, just then came from the country; and not liking my sister’s room, went to an hotel, which wounded mother considerably, so she said I had better go upstairs again. I refused point blank; being down there I would remain, and so managed, that she thought I went back as a favour to her, and much —262—