Oh, I am a Pariah, I am unfit to live! In a savage country, to which
my thoughts often wander, I would stumble over every taboo, and soon
find myself in the oven. As it is, I stumble over everything, stools
and lady's trains, and upset porcelain, and break all the odds and
ends with which I fidget, and spill the salt, and then pour claret
over it, and call on the right people at the wrong houses, and put
letters in the wrong envelopes: one of the most terrible blunders of
the Social Duffer. Naturally, in place of improving, MACDUFFER gets
worse and worse: every failure which he discovers makes him more
nervous: besides he knows that, of all his errors, he only finds out a
small per-centage. Where can he take refuge? If _Robinson Crusoe_ had
been a social Duffer, he and _Friday_ would not have been on speaking
terms in a week. People think the poor Duffer malignant, boorish,
haughty, unkind; he is only a Duffer, an irreclaimable, sad, pitiful
creature, quite beyond the reach of philanthropy. On my grave write,
not MISERRIMUS (though that would be true enough), but FUTILISSIMUS.
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