My deafness steadily increased; my case was pronounced to be hopeless; the great authorities retired.
"Judicious friends, who had been waiting for their opportunity, undertook the moral management of me next.
"I was advised to cultivate cheerfulness, to go into society, to encourage kind people who tried to make me hear what was going on, to be on my guard against morbid depression, to check myself when the sense of my own horrible isolation drove me away to my room, and, last but by no means least, to beware of letting my vanity disincline me to use an ear-trumpet.
"I did my best, honestly did my best, to profit by the suggestions that were offered to me--not because I believed in the wisdom of my friends, but because I dreaded the effect of self-imposed solitude on my nature.
Since the fatal day when I had opened the sealed packet, I was on my guard against the inherited evil lying dormant, for all I knew to the contrary, in my father's son.

Impelled by that horrid dread, I suffered my daily martyrdom with a courage that astonishes me when I think of it now.
"What the self-inflicted torture of the deaf is, none but the deaf can understand.
"When benevolent persons did their best to communicate to me what was clever or amusing, while conversation was going on in my presence, I was secretly angry with them for making my infirmity conspicuous, and directing the general attention to me.

When other friends saw in my face that I was not grateful to them, and gave up the attempt to help me, I suspected them of talking of me contemptuously, and amusing themselves by making my misfortune the subject of coarse jokes.
"Even when I deserved encouragement by honestly trying to atone for my bad behavior, I committed mistakes (arising out of my helpless position) which prejudiced people against me.

Sometimes, I asked questions which appeared to be so trivial, to ladies and gentlemen happy in the possession of a sense of hearing, that they evidently thought me imbecile as well as deaf.

Sometimes, seeing the company enjoying an interesting story or a good joke, I ignorantly appealed to the most incompetent person present to tell me what had been said--with this result, that he lost the thread of the story or missed the point of the joke, and blamed my unlucky interference as the cause of it.
"These mortifications, and many more, I suffered patiently until, little by little, my last reserves of endurance felt the cruel strain on them, and failed me.