thought was travelling.  “How did you guess I was thinking of that?” would be asked.  To which the reply was, “I did not guess—­I knew.”  On the other hand I have an old and familiar friend, whom I know well and regard with great affection, but whose presence, and particularly a certain fixity of glance, often, even now, causes me a curious subjective disturbance which is not wholly pleasant, a sense of some odd psychical control which is not entirely agreeable.

I have another friend who is the most delightful and easy company in the world when we are, alone together; but he is a sensitive and highly-strung creature, much affected by personal influences, and when I meet him in the company of other people he is often almost unrecognisable.  His mind becomes critical, combative, acrid; he does not say what he means, he is touched by a vague excitement, and there passes over him an unnatural sort of brilliance, of a hard and futile kind, which makes him sacrifice consideration and friendliness to the instinctive desire to produce an effect and to score a point.  I sometimes actually detest him when he is one of a circle.  I feel inclined to say to him, “If only you could let your real self appear, and drop this tiresome posturing and fencing, you would be as delightful as you are to me when I am alone with you; but this hectic tittering and feverish jocosity is not only not your real self, but it gives others an impression of a totally unreal and not very agreeable person.”  But, alas, this is just the sort of thing one cannot say to a friend!

As one goes on in life, this terrible and disconcerting shyness of youth disappears.  We begin to realise, with a wholesome loss of vanity and conceit, how very little people care or even notice how we are dressed, how we look, what we say.  We learn that other people are as much preoccupied with their thoughts and fancies and reflections as we are with our own.  We realise that if we are anxious to produce an agreeable impression, we do so far more by being interested and sympathetic, than by attempting a brilliance which we cannot command.  We perceive that other people are not particularly interested in our crude views, nor very grateful for the expression of them.  We acquire the power of combination and co-operation, in losing the desire for splendour and domination.  We see that people value ease and security, more than they admire originality and fantastic contradiction.  And so we come to the blessed time when, instead of reflecting after a social occasion whether we did ourselves justice, we begin to consider rather the impression we have formed of other personalities.