VII
I
do
not say that my life began to be sad or oppressive from this time, although I know that children often take an extreme view of these matters, and I think that I was made as sensitively as most, perhaps because of my lameness if for no other reason; but always at the back of my mind I had the picture of my father swinging me up, away from the ganders, and I hung on to this picture of him and so did not see him as a hard disciplinarian. Besides, in a way, I felt that I had deserved the close supervision to which I now became subjected. I felt in my heart that I had somehow sinned in going out without my bonnet and shawl to spend the day with two boys! So each night I asked God to forgive me for troubling my kind parents by my thoughtlessness, until that special guilt faded away f
