y of their triumphs and
their piques; explain their purposes at length, and reassure me with
cheerfulness as to their chances of success; insist on their theories
and accept me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of future
discussions; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to their
husbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomprehensibleness as
typified in their wives; mention frequently the fair applause which
their merits have wrung from some persons, and the attacks to which
certain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I was
less free from superstition about my own power of charming, I
occasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my confiding
friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged to
hint at a corresponding experience in my own case; but the signs of a
rapidly lowering pulse and spreading nervous depression in my previously
vivacious interlocutor, warned me that I was acting on that dangerous
misreading, "Do as you are done by." Recalling the true version of the
golden rule, I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as I
was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result
from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except
my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these
fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally
felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I
aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its
gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in
private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the
experience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I am
really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in
without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the
scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden
in it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying oneself everybody
else and being unable to play one's own part decently--another form of
the disloyal attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to live
without a sharing of pain.

Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I have
not arrived at that non-human independence. My conversational
reticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper--as the
sea-lion plunges and swims the more energetically because