Explore "A Comedy of Masks" by Ernest Dowson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The period of Lightmark's boyhood had not been an altogether happy one. His earliest recollections carried him back to a time when he lived a wandering, desolate life with his father and mother, in an endless series of Continental hotels and _pensions_. He was prepared to assert, with confidence, that his mother had been a very beautiful person, who carried an air of the most abundant affection for him on the numerous occasions when she received her friends. Of his father, who had, as far as possible, ignored his existence, he remembered very little.
During these years there had been frequent difficulties, the nature of which he had since learned entirely to comprehend; controversies with white-waistcoated proprietors of hotels and voluble tradespeople, generally followed by a severance of hastily-cemented friendships, and a departure of apparently unpremeditated abruptness.