counting-house. The world to him is an "emporium," and he judges his
neighbour by the size of his plate glass. And so with the financier. When
one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left
only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was
quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a
million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea perfectly in
_Vanity Fair_:--

"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit and industry
and judicious speculations and that. Look at me and my banker's account.
Look at your poor grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a
better man than I was, this day twenty years--a better man I should say by
twenty thousand pounds."

I fancy I, too, have my professional way of looking at things, and am
disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in
the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he
"sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer
comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality
of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and
the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts you
among the commonplace.

In short, we all go through life wearing spectacles coloured by our own
tastes, our own calling, and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours
by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private
arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of
seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so
many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth.