g in our veins. We admire success unduly;
we like to be respected, to have a definite label, to know the right
people.

I remember once seeing a friendship of a rather promising kind forming
between two people, one of whom had a touch of what I may call "county"
vulgarity, by which I mean an undue recognition of "the glories of our
birth and state." It was a deep-seated fault, and emerged in a form
which is not uncommon among people of that type--namely, a tendency
to make friends with people of rank, coupled with a constant desire to
detect snobbishness in other people. There is no surer sign of innate
vulgarity than that; it proceeds, as a rule, from a dim consciousness of
the fault, combined with the natural shame of a high-minded nature
for being subject to it. In this particular case the man in question
sincerely desired to resist the fault, but he could not avoid making
himself slightly more deferential, and consequently slightly more
agreeable, to persons of position. If he had not suffered from the
fault, he would never have given the matter a thought at all.

The other partner in the friendly enterprise had a touch of a different
kind of snobbishness--the middle-class professional snobbishness,
which pays an undue regard to success, and gravitates to effective
and distinguished people. As the friendship matured, each became
unpleasantly conscious of the other's defect, while remaining
unconscious of his own. The result was a perpetual little friction on
the point. If both could have been perfectly sincere, and could have
confessed their weakness frankly, no harm would have been done. But each
was so sincerely anxious to present an unblemished soul to the other's
view, that they could not arrive at an understanding on the point; each
desired to appear more disinterested than he was; and so, after coming
together to a certain extent--both were fine natures--the presence of
grit in the machinery made itself gradually felt, and the friendship
melted away. It was a case of each desiring the unalloyed pleasure of an
admiring friendship, without accepting the responsibility of discovering
that the other was not perfection, and bearing that discovery loyally
and generously. For this is the worst of a friendship that begins in
idealisation rather than in comradeship; and this is the danger of
all people who idealise. When two such come together and feel a mutual
attraction, they display instinctively and unconsciously