Matters did not really improve between me and my father, though I had obeyed his wishes.

It was by his arrangement that I spent so much of my time at home with the Woods, and yet it remained a grievance that I liked to do so.

Whether my dear mother had given up all hopes of my becoming a genius I do not know, but my father's contempt for my absorption in a book was unabated.
I felt this if he came suddenly upon me with my head in my hands and my nose in a tattered volume; and if I went on with my reading it was with a sense of being in the wrong, whilst if I shut up the book and tried to throw myself into outside interests, my father's manner showed me that my efforts had only discredited my candour.
As is commonly the case, it was chiefly little things that pulled the wrong way of the stuff of life between us, but they pulled it very much askew.

I was selfishly absorbed in my own dreams, and I think my dear father made a mistake which is a too common bit of tyranny between people who love each other and live together.

He was not satisfied with my _doing_ what he liked, he expected me to _be_ what he liked, that is, to be another person instead of myself.