Meanwhile it is true, of course, that the most detestable people generally do improve upon acquaintance.  I have seldom spent any length of time in the enforced society of a disagreeable person without finding that I liked him better at the end than at the beginning.  Very often one finds that the disagreeable qualities are used as a sort of defensive panoply, and that they are the result, to a certain extent, of unhappy experiences.  Since I met our friend I have learnt a fact about him, which makes me view him in a somewhat different light, I have discovered that he was bullied at school.  I am inclined to believe that his fondness for bullying other people is mainly the result of this, and that it arises partly from a rooted belief that other people are malevolent, and that the only method is to exhibit his own spines; partly also from a perverted sense of justice; on the ground that, as he had to bear undeserved persecution in the days when he was defenceless, it is but just that others should bear it in their turn.  He is like the cabin-boy Ransome in Kidnapped, who, being treated with the grossest brutality by the officers, kept a rope’s end of his own to wallop the little ones with.  I do not say that this is a generous or high-hearted view of life.  It would be better if he could say Miseris succurrere disco.  What he rather says, to parody the words of the hermit in Edwin and Angelina, is—­

    “The flocks that range the valley free,
      To slaughter I condemn;
    Taught by the Power that bullies me,
      I learn to bully them.”

It is a poor consolation to say that the man who is not loved is miserable.  He is, if he desires to be loved and cannot attain it; if he says, as Hazlitt said, “I cannot make out why everybody should dislike me so.”  But if he does not want love in the least, while he gets what he does desire—­money, a place in the world, influence of a sort—­then he is not miserable at all, and it is idle to pretend that he is.

But if, as I say, one is condemned to the society of a disagreeable person, it generally happens that on his discovering one to be harmless and friendly he will furl his spines and become, if not an animal that one can safely stroke, at least an animal whose proximity it is not necessary to dread and avoid.  One can generally establish a modus vivendi, and unless the man is untrustworthy as well, one may hope to live peacefully with him.  The worst point about our friend is that he is frankly jealous, and woe betide you if you gain any species of reputation on lines that he does not approve.  Then indeed nothing can save you, because he resents your success as a personal injury done to his own.