Hartley, The shrimp and the anemone

Leslie Poles Hartley, The shrimp and the anemone

Eustace was faced with nothing more dreadful than the obligation to choose between a paper-chase and a tea-party, but none the less he went to bed feeling that the morrow would be worse than a crisis; it would be a kind of death. To his imagination, now sickened and inflamed with apprehension, either alternative seemed equally desperate. For the first time in his life he was unable to think of himself as existing the next day. There would be a Eustace, he supposed, but it would be someone else, someone to whom things happened that he, the Eustace of tonight, knew nothing about. [...]

For the first time, then, he obscurely felt that Hilda was treating him badly. She was a tyrant, and he was justified in resisting her. Nancy was right to taunt him with his dependence on her. His thoughts ran on. He was surrounded by tyrants who thought they had a right to order him about: it was a conspiracy. He could not call his soul his own. In all his actions he was propitiating somebody. This must stop. His lot was not, he saw in a flash of illumination, the common lot of children. Like him they were obedient, perhaps, and punished for disobedience, but obedience had not got into their blood, it was not a habit of mind, it was detachable, like the clothes they put oh and off. As far as they could, they did what they liked; they were not haunted, as he was, with the fear of not giving satisfaction to someone else. [...]

'Eustace had never been disobedient before,' ran the self-congratulatory monologue in his mind, 'except once or twice, and now he was only doing what Gerald and Nancy Steptoe have always done. [...]
Here the record, which had been wobbling and scratching for some time past, stopped with a scream of disgust. Nervously Eustace tried another.
[...]

"It doesn't matter if they are."  This was a new idea to Eustace. He had always believed that for people to be worried on his account was, next to their being angry, the worst thing that could happen. Cautiously he introduced the new thought into his consciousness and found it took root.

Hartley, L.P. (2000). The shrimp and the anemone, VII. Faber and Faber.