cy picture. But I thoroughly disliked
my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of
poetic genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief hope was quite
fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid
organization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime
resistance of poetic production. Alfred, from whom I had been almost
constantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character and
appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being
extremely friendly and brother-like to me. He had the superficial
kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no
rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties. I am not sure that my
disposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from envy
towards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had been in
the healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence and
charitable construction. There must always have been an antipathy
between our natures. As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of
intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he
spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on
edge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually
occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other
person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with the petty
promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his
self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half-
pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of
intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious
mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.

For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware of
it. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me on
a nearer acquaintance. That effect was chiefly determined by the fact
that she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, to
my unhappy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always in a state of
uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on
its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of
ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope
and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny. I say
it was this fact that chiefly determined the str