d so's looking at me, and I was always the first to
drop my eyes. This worried me to distraction. I had a sickly dread,
too, of being ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the
conventional in everything external. I loved to fall into the common
rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in
myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive as a
man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one
another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who
fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because
I was more highly developed. But it was not only that I fancied it, it
really was so. I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the
slightest embarrassment. Every decent man of our age must be a coward
and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly
persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only
at the present time owing to some casual circumstances, but always, at
all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. It is the
law of nature for all decent people all over the earth. If anyone of
them happens to be valiant about something, he need not be comforted
nor carried away by that; he would show the white feather just the same
before something else. That is how it invariably and inevitably ends.
Only donkeys and mules are valiant, and they only till they are pushed
up to the wall. It is not worth while to pay attention to them for
they really are of no consequence.

Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no
one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are
EVERYONE," I thought--and pondered.

From that it is evident that I was still a youngster.

The very opposite sometimes happened. It was loathsome sometimes to go
to the office; things reached such a point that I often came home ill.
But all at once, A PROPOS of nothing, there would come a phase of
scepticism and indifference (everything happened in phases to me), and
I would laugh myself at my intolerance and fastidiousness, I would
reproach myself with being ROMANTIC. At one time I was unwilling to
speak to anyone, while at other times I would not only talk, but go to
the length of contemplating making friends with them. All my
fastidiousness would suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, vanish. Who
knows, perhaps I never had really had it, and it had simply been
a