are cowls.

In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certain
than in other lands. For through his national reserve the
highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to
which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy
is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient
friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to
assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win a
golden friendship; but only on a desert island would he permit the
operation. To the shy who may encumber his path his bearing seems marked
by an indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby the
worse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go through
life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and
the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the
pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse.

I say, then, that the real, the enduring shyness is that inveteration of
reserve to which a few men in a few countries are miserably condemned.
Others know it as a transient inconvenience, as the croup or measles of
childhood; but in us it is obstinate and ineradicable as grave disease.
If out of the long frustration of our efforts to be whole some strain of
bitterness passes into our nature; if sometimes we burn with unjust
resentment against the fate which, suffers such lives as ours to be
prolonged, let it be remembered in extenuation that to those who bear a
double burden human charity owes the larger kindliness. For though like
you we bear our share of common troubles, O happier men and women, the
common pleasures and compensations which are as wings upon your
shoulders are heavy packs on ours. The cheerful contrasts are for you
alone; for us the bright threads interwoven in the dark stuff of life
were faded before they reached the loom.

You who have the friendships and affections without which you would not
care to live a day, think more kindly of those to whom the interludes of
toil are often harder than the toil itself. Of your charity believe our
fate ordained and not the choice of our own perversity; for what man
born of woman would choose a path so sad, were there not within him some
guiding and possessing devil which he could in nowise cast out? Never
will in maddest hours of freedom consented to such doom; we were
condemned at birth, our threads were spo