Chapter 1"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I have been turning in my mind ever since.
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember
that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that
you've had.
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative
in a reserved way and I understood that he meant a great deal more
than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a
habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made
me victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal
person, so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of
being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought_frequently
I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I
realized by some unmistakeably sign that an intimate revelation
was quivering on the horizon_for the intimate revelations of
young men or at least the terms in which they express them are
usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving
judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid
of missing something if I forgot that, as my father snobbishly
suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental
decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."
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