I am fifteen years older than he, I am bald, obscure, and far
from prosperous, and there is unmistakably nothing about me to dazzle
the youthful imagination. Yet the facts are as I have stated them.
Philip likes to be with me, copies me without apparently trying to, and
has chosen my profession--so he has often told me--for his own. I am
pretty sure that he has made up his mind when he is as old as I am to
smoke the same brand of rather mediocre tobacco which I have adopted for
practical reasons. I am sometimes tempted to think that Philip, at my
age, intends to be as bald as I am.
Hence the alternate thrills and chills. I am by nature restless under
worship. The sense of my own inconsequence grows positively painful in
the face of Philip's outspoken veneration. There are people to whom such
tribute is as incense and honey. But I am not one of them. I have tried
to be and have failed. I have argued with myself that, after all, it is
the outsider who is the best judge; that we are most often severest upon
ourselves; that if Philip finds certain high qualities in me, perhaps
there is in me something exceptional.
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