The dramatic sense is not a thing which necessarily increases as life goes on; some people have it from the very beginning.  I have an elderly friend who is engaged on a very special sort of scientific research of a wholly unimportant kind.  He is just as incapable as my sympathetic friend of talking about anything except his own interests; “You don’t mind my speaking about my work?” he says with a brilliant smile; “you see it means so much to me.”  And then, after explaining some highly technical detail, he will add:  “Of course this seems to you very minute, but it is work that has got to be done by some one; it is only laying a little stone in the temple of science.  Of course I often feel I should like to spread my wings and take a wider flight, but I do seem to have a special faculty for this kind of work, and I suppose it is my duty to stick to it.”  And he will pass his hand wearily over his brow, and expound another technical detail.  He apologises ceaselessly for dwelling on his own work; but in no place or company have I ever heard him do otherwise; and he is certainly one of the happiest people I know.

But, on the other hand, it is a rather charming quality to find in combination with a certain balance of mind.  Unless a man is interesting to himself he cannot easily be interesting to others; there is a youthful and ingenuous sense of romance and drama which can exist side by side with both modesty and sympathy, somewhat akin to the habit common to imaginative children of telling themselves long stories in which they are the heroes of the tale.  But people who have this faculty are generally mildly ashamed of it; they do not believe that their fantastic adventures are likely to happen.  They only think how pleasant it would be if things arranged themselves so.  It all depends whether such dramatisation is looked upon in the light of an amusement, or whether it is applied in a heavy-handed manner to real life.  Imaginative children, who have true sympathy and affection as well, generally end by finding the real world, as they grow up into it, such an astonishing and interesting place, that their horizon extends, and they apply to other people, to their relationships and meetings, the zest and interest that they formerly applied only to themselves.  The kind of temperament that falls a helpless victim to dramatic egotism is generally the priggish and self-satisfied man, who has a fervent belief in his own influence, and the duty of exercising it on others.  Most of us, one may say gratefully, are kept humble by our failures and even by our sins.  If the path of the transgressor is hard, the path of the righteous man is often harder.  If a man is born free from grosser temptations, vigorous, active, robust, the chances are ten to one that he falls into the snare of self-righteousness and moral complacency.  He passes judgment on others, he compares himself favourably with them.  A spice of unpopularity gives him a still more fatal bias, because he thinks that he