and if I had been in the healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence and charitable construction.  There must always have been an antipathy between our natures.  As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on edge.  My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other person who came in my way.  I was perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant’s passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt for me—­seen not in the ordinary indications of intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.

For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware of it.  I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me on a nearer acquaintance.  That effect was chiefly determined by the fact that she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, to my unhappy gift of insight.  About Bertha I was always in a state of uncertainty:  I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear:  she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny.  I say it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me:  for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha’s.  She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time.  To this moment I am unable to define my feeling towards her:  it was not ordinary boyish admiration, for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her hair, of the ideal woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness; and she was without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even at the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared to be the highest element of character.  But there is no tyranny more complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.  The most independent people feel the effect of a man’s silence in heightening their value for his opinion—­feel an additional triumph in conquering the reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical:  no wonder, then, that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait before the closed secret of a sarcastic woman’s face,