I haven't the slightest doubt he considered himself vastly my superior--indeed, had you been Emperor of East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence--but I couldn't get up any real sentiment of offence.

He did not despise me for anything I could help, for anything I was--don't you know?
I was a negligible quantity simply because I was not _the_ fortunate man of the earth, not Montague Brierly in command of the Ossa, not the owner of an inscribed gold chronometer and of silver-mounted binoculars testifying to the excellence of my seamanship and to my indomitable pluck; not possessed of an acute sense of my merits and of my rewards, besides the love and worship of a black retriever, the most wonderful of its kind--for never was such a man loved thus by such a dog.

No doubt, to have all this forced upon you was exasperating enough; but when I reflected that I was associated in these fatal disadvantages with twelve hundred millions of other more or less human beings, I found I could bear my share of his good-natured and contemptuous pity for the sake of something indefinite and attractive in the man.

I have never defined to myself this attraction, but there were moments when I envied him.

The sting of life could do no more to his complacent soul than the scratch of a pin to the smooth face of a rock.