people.  There is no surer sign of innate vulgarity than that; it proceeds, as a rule, from a dim consciousness of the fault, combined with the natural shame of a high-minded nature for being subject to it.  In this particular case the man in question sincerely desired to resist the fault, but he could not avoid making himself slightly more deferential, and consequently slightly more agreeable, to persons of position.  If he had not suffered from the fault, he would never have given the matter a thought at all.

The other partner in the friendly enterprise had a touch of a different kind of snobbishness—­the middle-class professional snobbishness, which pays an undue regard to success, and gravitates to effective and distinguished people.  As the friendship matured, each became unpleasantly conscious of the other’s defect, while remaining unconscious of his own.  The result was a perpetual little friction on the point.  If both could have been perfectly sincere, and could have confessed their weakness frankly, no harm would have been done.  But each was so sincerely anxious to present an unblemished soul to the other’s view, that they could not arrive at an understanding on the point; each desired to appear more disinterested than he was; and so, after coming together to a certain extent—­both were fine natures—­the presence of grit in the machinery made itself gradually felt, and the friendship melted away.  It was a case of each desiring the unalloyed pleasure of an admiring friendship, without accepting the responsibility of discovering that the other was not perfection, and bearing that discovery loyally and generously.  For this is the worst of a friendship that begins in idealisation rather than in comradeship; and this is the danger of all people who idealise.  When two such come together and feel a mutual attraction, they display instinctively and unconsciously the best of themselves; but melancholy discoveries supervene; and then what generally happens is that the idealising friend is angry with the other for disappointing his hopes, not with himself for drawing an extravagant picture.

Such friendships have a sort of emotional sensuality about them; and to be dismayed by later discoveries is to decline upon Rousseau’s vice of handing in his babies to the Foundling Hospital, instead of trying to bring them up honestly; what lies at the base of it is the indolent shirking of the responsibilities for the natural consequences of friendship.  The mistake arises from a kind of selfishness, the selfishness that thinks more of what it wants and desires to get, than of taking what there is soberly and gratefully.