om the contemplation and disclosure of their own
qualities: you can play on their vanity if your own does not stand in
the road. Hartman has a fine mind, but in his innocent rural way he took
for granted that I had stood still since we were together at college. So
I played to his lead, and pretended, for instance, to know nothing about
poetry; whereas, as you must have noticed, I am pretty well read, and my
memory is remarkably copious and accurate. (Clarice did indeed say that
I sometimes got the lines wrong; but what she meant was that the
passages I quoted in my well-meant efforts to console her were of too
gay a character for her melancholy mood.)

In this way I secured Jim's regard and confidence, which I am using for
his good: if I had put myself forward, and been anxious to impress him
with my importance, he might have looked on me with the cynical
indifference which is all the feeling he can afford to most people, and
I should never have got him out of the woods. So when I was taking him
to Newport, I said what it was desirable to say, and omitted what was
not: how else should a rational man talk? And that first night there, I
took the tone that he required, as a host is bound to do: sacred are the
duties of christian hospitality. Poor Jim is as good as a play; he takes
Life in such dead earnest, and expects his friends to be rampant
idealists too: so I mounted the high horse for once to gratify him. He
will never forget that, nor cease to respect me accordingly: he thinks I
was serious then, and joking at all other times. You and I of course
understand that Life is but a series of appearances; and if I seem to
contradict myself, to say one thing on one page and its opposite on the
next, I am only reporting the various phases assumed by facts without
and moods within. 'The shield is gold.' 'No, it is silver.' Well, shall
we fight about that? Probably it is both. A thing may be black in one
light, and white in another, for what I know. Of all fools the positive
philosophers seem to me the worst; and the most abject kind of conceit
is that of alleged consistency. Why will you insist on a definiteness
which has so little place in nature? The world is a chameleon, and you
and I are smaller copies of it.

I must try to explain all this to Hartman, and make him see that it is
time he took on another color. He has been down in the depths all this
while; now let him get up on the heights. But he would never do it of
hi