"That's all it ever is," said Harry. "Just an occasional glimmering. The true feeling, that is. If it's anything more, it isn't really that at all, but just a sort of stuckupness, an idea that I am equal to the worst life can do to Me! I know people that seem to have that attitude—insufferable! Only life is pretty apt to punish them by giving them a great deal more than they bargained for."
James was silent a moment, as with a sort of confessional silence. But he knew Harry would not understand its confessional quality, so he said quietly: "That's exactly what happened to me, of course."
"Oh, rot! Did you think I meant you?"
"No, but it's true, for all that. Thank Heaven I have been permitted to live through it!... The truth is, I suppose, I was too successful early in life. In school, in college and afterward it was always the same—I found myself able to do certain things with an ease that surprised and delighted people—no one more than myself. For they weren't things that mattered especially, you see; they were showy, spectacular things that appealed to the public eye, like playing football. I was a good physical specimen, not through any effort or merit of my own, but simply through a natural gift, and a very poor and hollow gift it is, as I've found out. I don't think people quite realize the problem that a man of the athletic type has to face if he's going to make anything out of himself but an athlete. From early boyhood he's conscious of physical superiority; he knows perfectly well that in the last resort he can knock the other fellow down and stamp on him, and that gives him a certain feeling of repose and self-sufficiency that's very pernicious. It usually passes for strength of character, but it's nothing in the world but faith in bone and muscle. And people do worship physical strength so! It's small wonder a man gets his head turned.... Good Lord, the ideas I used to have about myself! Why, in college, if any one had made me say what, in the bottom of my heart, I thought was the greatest possible thing for a man of my years to be, I should have said being a great football player in a great university. That is, I wouldn't have said it, because that would have been like bragging, and it isn't done to brag: but that would have been my secret thought.
"And then, if the man has any brains or any capacity for feeling, he runs up against some of the big forces of life, and he finds his physical strength no more use to him than a broken reed. It's quite a shock! I've been more severely tried than most people are, I imagine, but Heaven knows I needed it! Everything had gone my way before that; I literally never knew what it was to have to put up a fight against something I recognized as stronger than I and likely to beat me in the end. Well, I'm grateful enough for it now. Thank Heaven for it! Thank Heaven for letting me fight and find out my weakness and come through it somehow, instead of remaining a mere mountain of beef all my days!"
Both stood silent for a moment after James had ended this confession, less because they felt embarrassment in the presence of the feeling that lay behind it than because for a short time the past lay on them too heavily for words. After a few seconds they moved as though by a common impulse and walked slowly along the grassy crest of the ridge, and Harry began again.
"What you say sounds very well coming from you, James, but I have reason to believe that very little, if any of it, is true. It was my privilege to know you during the years you speak of, and I seem to remember you as something more than a mountain of beef. Don't be absurd, James!"
He paused a moment and then went on more seriously: "No, James; if there was ever any danger of any of us suffering from cock-sureness it's I, at this moment. Do you realize how ridiculously happy I've been for the last year or so? This success of mine—oh, I've worked, but it's been absurdly easy, for all that—and Madge, and everything—it seems sometimes as if there was something strange and sinister about it. It simply can't be good for any one to be so happy! It worries me."
"Well, as long as it does, you needn't," said James.
"Oh, I see! That makes it quite simple, of course!"