known the necessity of making friends
      Sleep!  A despised waste of time in childhood
      So glad to have what other people haven’t
      Sought to remove comparisons
      Taking him like daily bread, to be eaten and not thought about
      That magic word Change
      The greatest wonders are not at the ends of the earth, but near
      The days of useless martyrdom are past
      Thinking that because you have no ideals, other people haven’t
      Those who walk on ice will slide against their wills
      Time, the unbribeable
      Weak coffee and the Protestant religion seemed inseparable
      Why should I desire what I cannot have

THE CELEBRITY

By Winston Churchill

VOLUME 1.

CHAPTER I

I was about to say that I had known the Celebrity from the time he wore kilts.  But I see I shall have to amend that, because he was not a celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after I had left New York for the West.  In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever.  He never read me any of his manuscripts, which I can safely say he would have done had he written any at that time, and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned.  But he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact with the Celebrity.  Hence I am constrained to the belief that his eccentricity must have arrived with his genius, and both after the age of twenty-five.  Far be it from me to question the talents of one upon whose head has been set the laurel of fame!

When I knew him he was a young man without frills or foibles, with an excellent head for business.  He was starting in to practise law in a downtown office with the intention of becoming a great corporation lawyer.  He used to drop into my chambers once in a while to smoke, and was first-rate company.  When I gave a dinner there was generally a cover laid for him.  I liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me.  I look upon notoriety with the same indifference as on the buttons on a man’s shirt-front, or the crest on his note-paper.

When I went West, he fell out of my life.  I probably should not have given him another thought had I not caught sight of his name, in old capitals, on a daintily covered volume in a book-stand.  I had little time or inclination for reading fiction; my days were busy ones, and my nights were spent with law books.  But I bought the volume out of curiosity, wondering the while whether he could have written it.  I was soon set at rest, for the dedication was to a young woman of whom I had often heard him speak.