In his statement, Henry Jekyll begins by saying he was born to a large fortune and had every advantage, which should have guaranteed him a good future. The worst of his faults, he admits, was a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition," which he found hard to reconcile with his desire for respectability. For this reason, he learned to conceal his baser desires, and by the time he reached his golden years and began to take stock of his life, he realized he'd become profoundly duplicitous (two-faced).
Torn between restraint and shame when he gave into his desires, Jekyll's high expectations of himself led him to reflect deeply on his own duplicity-how he'd tried to separate the good and ill in himself, which he describes as "that hard law of.....
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