reference
or an unreasonable prejudice in their presence one is ashamed, as one
is for hurling a stone into a sleeping pool. One comes away from them
desiring to appreciate rather than to contemn, with horizons and vistas
of true and beautiful things opening up on all sides, with a wish to
know more and to understand more, and to believe more; with the sense
of a desirable secret of which they have the possession.

One meets sometimes exactly the opposite of all this, a lively,
brilliant, contemptuous specialist, who talks briskly and lucidly about
his own subject, and makes one feel humble and clumsy and drowsy. One
sees that he is pleased to talk, and when the ball rolls to one's feet,
one makes a feeble effort to toss it back, whereupon he makes a fine
stroke, with an ill-concealed contempt for a person who is so
ill-informed. Perhaps it is good to be humiliated thus; but it is not
pleasant, and the worst of it is that one confuses the subject with the
personality behind it, and thinks that the subject is dreary when it is
only the personality that is repellent.

Such a man is repellent, because he is self-absorbed, conceited,
contemptuous. He has grown up inside a sort of walled fortress, and he
thinks that everyone outside is a knave or a fool. He has not
_changed_. It is this change, this progress of the soul that is
adorable.

The question for most of us--a sad question too--is whether this
change, this progress, is attainable, or whether a power of growth is
given to some people and denied to others. I am afraid that this is
partially true. A good many people seem to be born inside a hard
carapace which cannot expand; and it protects them from the sensitive
apprehension of injury and hurt, which is in reality the only condition
of growth. If we feel our failures, if we see, every now and then, how
unjustly, unkindly, perversely we have behaved, we try to be different
next time. Perhaps the motive is not a very high one, because it is to
avoid similar suffering; but we improve a little and a little.

Of course, occasionally, one meets people who have not changed much,
because they started on so high a plane--it is commoner to find this
among women than among men; they have begun life tender, loyal,
unselfish; it has always been a greater happiness to see that people
round them are pleased than to find their own satisfaction. Such people
are often what the world calls ineffective, because they have no
selfish