this scorn, sufferers as I believe from a hereditary tendency matured by
neglect into disease, deserve a more merciful usage than this, and their
plea for extenuating circumstances should not be too impatiently
rejected. For in them what is to most men a transient ailment has thrown
down permanent roots to draw a nourishment from pain: and he who is
fortunate enough to be whole should think twice before he makes sport of
those in this distress.

To me this malady seems to arise from an antinomy between the physical
and intellectual elements of the personality, from an unhappy marriage
of mind and body, suffering the lower of the two partners to abase the
life of the higher by the long-drawn misery of a hateful but
indissoluble union. When the physical and mental natures in a man are
happily attuned, there is a fair concord in his life and the outward
expression of his being is an unimpeded process, to which, as to the
functions of a healthy organism, no heedful thought is given. If both
natures are of the finest temper, they find utterance in a noble
amiability and ease of manner; if both are coarse in the grain, they
blend in a naive freedom always sure of itself, the freedom of Sancho
spreading himself in the duchess's boudoir. Between these two extremes
there intervene a hundred compromises by which minds and bodies less
equally yoked contrive to muffle the discordant notes of an inharmonious
wedlock.

In most cases use gives to this politic agreement the peace and
permanence of settled habit; the body proves itself so far amenable that
it is accepted as a needful if uninspiring companion, and its plain
usefulness ends by dulling the edged criticisms of the mind. But
wherever there is a permanent incompatibility too profound for
compromise, an elemental difference keeping the personality continually
distraught, then shyness, in the sense in which I understand it, assumes
its inalienable dominion. The flame of rebellion may smoulder unobserved
while the sufferer is in his own home, but among strangers it will
blaze fiercely, as the mind protests against the misinterpretations of
its unworthy partner. This burning shame is not the proof of a foolish
conceit, as unsympathetic criticism proclaims it, but the visible misery
of a keen spirit thwarted by physical defect. The man who manifests it
is angered with himself because through a physical hindrance he has
failed to take the place which would otherwise be his. He i