I even made experiments whether I could face so and

so's looking at me, and I was always the first to drop my eyes. This worried

me to distraction. I had a sickly dread, too, of being ridiculous, and so had

a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external. I loved to fall

into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of

eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly

sensitive as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like

one another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who

fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because I was

more highly developed. But it was not only that I fancied it, it really was so.

I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment.

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his

normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed

to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some

casual circumstances, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to

be a coward and a slave. It is the law of nature for all decent people all over

the earth. If anyone of them happens to be valiant about something, he

need not be comforted nor carried away by that; he would show the white

feather just the same before something else. That is how it invariably and

inevitably ends. Only donkeys and mules are valiant, and they only till

they are pushed up to the wall. It is not worth while to pay attention to

them for they really are of no consequence.

Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no

one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are

EVERYONE," I thought--and pondered.

From that it is evident that I was still a youngster.

The very opposite sometimes happened. It was loathsome sometimes

to go to the office; things reached such a point that I often came home ill.

But all at once, A PROPOS of nothing, there would come a phase of

scepticism and indifference (everything happened in phases to me), and I

would laugh myself at my intolerance and fastidiousness, I would reproach

myself with being ROMANTIC. At one time I was unwilling to speak

to anyone, while at other times I would not only talk, but go to the length

of contemplating making friends with them. All my fastidiousness would

suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, vanish. Who knows, perhaps I never

had really had it, and it had simply been affected, and got out of books. I

have not decided that question even now.