Maugham always denied that he had a "philosophy of life," claiming that he was not a philosopher but a novelist who "told the truth." Placing himself at the very top of the second rank of novelists (those in the first rank, such as Dostoevsky, could see "through a brick wall"), someone who could see very well "what is in front of my nose." One thing that he saw repeatedly in his works, and very notably in this one, was the contradictions among people and the essential inaccessability of them. As he says, speaking as the narrator, "We go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them." This sort of somewhat gloomy observation about the human personality finds expression often in this text: "I had not yet learned how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there...