school. My bedroom window looked out over the sea, about a hundred yards away, and behind the house were the Mourne Mountains, and the Derryaghy estate, which took in the lower slopes of Slieve Donard. Our house, when the Virginian creeper that covered it was red, looked pretty enough from the road, but was poorly and even meagrely furnished. The most that could be said for it was that it was clean and tidy. The few attempts at ornamentation would have been better away—the two or three pictures, the hideous vases on the mantelpiece. My father had a strong liking for illuminated texts, and there were several of these, in gilt frames, in every room in the house, including the kitchen and the bath-room. What furniture there was was modern, cheap, and objectionable: it was characteristic of my father that he had never even bought himself a comfortable arm-chair.
He was a tall man, thin and grizzled, pale, and dressed always in an ill-cut, ready-made, black tail-coat and waistcoat, with dark gray trousers. I always disliked his clothes, especially the two shining buttons at the back of his coat. He wore a beard and moustache, both somewhat ragged, and his brown eyes were indescribably melancholy. His hands and feet were very coarse and large. There was power in his face, but there was a depressing lack of anything approaching geniality. He gave me the impression that he did everything from a sense of duty, and nothing because he took a pleasure in it. The seriousness of his expression was truly portentous: it was impossible that anything in the world could matter so much as that. He was not well-off—that is obvious from the position he occupied—but he lived in a way that was unnecessarily economical. He was by no means ungenerous if it were some case of distress that had come to his knowledge, but in ordinary life he was excessively near. The only luxuries
