disguising that, and in the gymnasium or the riding-hall other men
would win applause for performing a feat of horsemanship or a
difficult trick on the parallel bars, which same feat, when I repeated
it immediately after them, and even a little better than they had done
it, would be received in silence. I could not see the reason for this,
and the fact itself hurt me much more than anyone guessed. Then as
they would not signify by their approbation that I was the best
athlete in the class, I took to telling them that I was, which did not
help matters. I find it is the same in the world as it is at the
Academy--that if one wants recognition, he must pretend not to see
that he deserves it. If he shows he does see it, everyone else will
grow blind, holding, I suppose, that a conceited man carries his own
comfort with him, and is his own reward. I soon saw that the cadet who
was modest received more praise than the cadet who was his superior,
but who, through repeated success, had acquired a self-confident, or,
as some people call it, a conceited manner; and so, for a time, I
pretended to be modest, too, and I never spoke of my athletic
successes. But I was never very good at pretending, and soon gave it
up. Then I grew morbid over my inability to make friends, and moped by
myself, having as little to do with my classmates as possible. In my
loneliness I began to think that I was a much misunderstood
individual. My solitary state bred in me a most unhealthy disgust for
myself, and, as it always is with those who are at times exuberantly
light-hearted and self-assertive, I had terrible fits of depression
and lack of self-confidence, during which spells I hated myself and
all of those about me. Once, during one of these moods, a First-Class
man, who had been a sneak in his plebe year and a bully ever since,
asked me, sneeringly, how "Napoleon on the Isle of St. Helena "was
feeling that morning, and I told him promptly to go to the devil, and
added that if he addressed me again, except in the line of his duty, I