and
the pain from which he had been saved in the first instance by
surroundings so new that he had hardly recognised his own identity in the
middle of them, came on him as from a wound inflicted yesterday.

He thought of the high resolves which he had made in prison about using
his disgrace as a vantage ground of strength rather than trying to make
people forget it. "That was all very well then," he thought to himself,
"when the grapes were beyond my reach, but now it is different." Besides,
who but a prig would set himself high aims, or make high resolves at all?

Some of his old friends, on learning that he had got rid of his supposed
wife and was now comfortably off again, wanted to renew their
acquaintance; he was grateful to them and sometimes tried to meet their
advances half way, but it did not do, and ere long he shrank back into
himself, pretending not to know them. An infernal demon of honesty
haunted him which made him say to himself: "These men know a great deal,
but do not know all--if they did they would cut me--and therefore I have
no right to their acquaintance."

He thought that everyone except himself was _sans peur et sans reproche_.
Of course they must be, for if they had not been, would they not have
been bound to warn all who had anything to do with them of their
deficiencies? Well, he could not do this, and he would not have people's
acquaintance under false pretences, so he gave up even hankering after
rehabilitation and fell back upon his old tastes for music and
literature.

Of course he has long since found out how silly all this was, how silly I
mean in theory, for in practice it worked better than it ought to have
done, by keeping him free from _liaisons_ which would have tied his
tongue and made him see success elsewhere than where he came in time to
see it. He did what he did instinctively and for no other reason than
because it was most natural to him. So far as he thought at all, he
thought wrong, but what he did was right. I said something of this kind
to him once not so very long ago, and told him he had always aimed high.
"I never aimed at all," he replied a little indignantly, "and you may be
sure I should have aimed low enough if I had thought I had got the
chance."

I suppose after all that no one whose mind was not, to put it mildly,
abnormal, ever yet aimed very high out of pure malice aforethought. I
once saw a fly alight on a cup of hot coffee on which the milk had