It is strange
that, although spite was painful to me, especially towards her, I
could not help indulging in it.
My failings gradually wrought in me confirmed bitterness. I
persuaded myself that the interest which people appeared to take in
me was mere polite pretence. There may be enough selfishness in the
world to explain misanthropy, but there is never enough to justify
it, and what we imagine to be indifference to us is often merely the
reserve caused by our own refusal to surrender ourselves to
legitimate and generous emotions. Oddly enough, I frequently made
hasty and spasmodic offers of intimate friendship to people who were
not prepared for them, and the natural absence of immediate response
was a further reason for scepticism. A man to whom I was suddenly
impelled was in want of money, and I pressed ten pounds upon him.
He could not pay me at the appointed time, whereupon I set him down
as an ungrateful brute, and moralised like Timon.
There was at that time living in London a lady whom I must call Mrs.
A. She was the widow of a professor at Cambridge who had died
young, and she might have been about five-and-thirty or forty years
old.
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