them like a flood, and have kept them swimming with sturdy stroke
the years through, their eyes level with the troubled surface--no
horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no comrades but those who
struggled in the flood like themselves. If they be frivolous,
light-headed, men without purpose or achievement, we may conjecture,
if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or
befuddled by self-indulgence. It is no great matter what we think
of them.

It is enough to know that there are some laws which govern a man's
awakening to know himself and the right part to play. A man is the
part he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be.
His life is made up of the relations he bears to others--is made or
marred by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed
in them. There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit--
nothing else that we can see. It is by these he gets his spiritual
growth; it is by these we see his character revealed, his purpose
and his gifts. Some play with a certain natural passion, an
unstudied directness, without grace, without modulation, with no
study of the masters or consciousness of the pervading spirit of the
plot; others gives all their thought to their costume and think only
of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets of
a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the
great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good
servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity,
lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the
action. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease of a
perfect adjustment.

Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself.