son Crusoe, I discovered a footprint,
and found that the planet on which I had been so mysteriously cast was
inhabited.. There were two of us--myself and The Other Fellow.

As soon as I could devise means of locomotion, I set out, like Robinson
Crusoe, to find out what The Other Fellow was like. I had a kind of
instinct that sooner or later I should have to fight him. I found that
he differed from me in one essential particular. He had hundreds of
millions of heads; I had but one. He had hundreds of millions of feet;
hundreds of millions of hands; hundreds of millions of ears and eyes; I
had but two. But for all that, it never occurred to me that he was
greater than I. _Myself_ always appeared to me to be vastly more
important than _The Other Fellow_. It was nothing to me that he
starved so long as I had plenty of food. It was nothing to me that he
shivered so long as I was wrapped up snugly. I do not remember that it
ever once crossed my mind in the first six months of my existence that
it would be a bad thing if he died, with all his hundreds of millions
of heads, and left me all alone upon the planet. I was first, and he
was nowhere. I was everything, and he was nothing. Why, dear me, I
must have cut my first teeth before it occurred to me that there was
room on the planet for both of us; and I must have cut my wisdom teeth
before I discovered that the world was on the whole more interesting to
me because of his presence on it. And since then I have spent some
pains, in a blundering, unskilful kind of a way, in trying to make
myself tolerable to him. And the longer I live the more clearly I see
that, although he is an odd fellow at times, he is very quick to
respond to and reciprocate such advances. He is discovering, as I am,
that walking in step has a pleasure peculiar to itself.

III

I said a moment ago that half the air of life lies in learning to keep
step. Conversely, half the tragedy of life consists in our failure so
to do. Here are Mr. and Mrs. Cardew. All lovers of Mark Rutherford
know them well. They were both of them really excellent people; a
minister and his wife; deeply attached to one another; and yet as
wretched as wretched could be. How are you going to account for it?
It is vastly important just because it is so common. Domestic
difficulties rarely arise out of downright wickedness. Husband and
wife may be as free from all outward fault as poor Mr. and Mrs. Cardew.
Mark