"Stick it where you will," said Mr. Lofty, "for by the lord, it cuts a poor
figure where it sticks at present." Mr. Sutherland Bangs would feel like
that.

But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of
surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well.
Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines:

O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us:
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion.

We should all make discoveries to our advantage as well as our
discomfiture. You, sir, might find that the talent for argument on which
you pride yourself is to me only irritating wrong-headedness, and I might
find that the bright wit that I fancy I flash around makes you feel tired.
Jones's eyeglass would drop out of his eye because he would know it only
made him look foolish, Brown would see the ugliness of his cant, and
Robinson would sorry that he had been born a bully and as prickly as a
hedgehog. It would do us all good to get this objective view of ourselves.

It is not necessarily the right view or the complete view. You remember
that ingenious fancy of Holmes' about John and Thomas. They are talking
together and don't quite hit it off, and Holmes says it is no wonder since
six persons are engaged in the conversation. "Six!" you say, lifting your
eyebrows. Yes, six, says he. There is John's ideal John--that is, John as
he appears to himself; Thomas's ideal John--that is, John as Thomas sees
him; and the real John, known only to his Maker. And so with Thomas, there
are three of him engaged in the talk also. Now John's ideal John is not a