Then Aubrey had spent the few months wondering why this was so. But he had become too busy to do much thinking. His publishers were demanding more work--so he let other matters drop. His curiosity had carried him to the brink of an idea and he had somewhat impatiently turned his back on it. He had felt that to think as he was thinking about people who were praising him and buying his books, was to play the part of an ungrateful cad. The idea that had come dangerously close to Aubrey's consciousness was the curious notion that people resented acclaiming anybody like themselves. The lucky ones who secured their hurrah became in their eyes no longer normal humans but super-persons about whom they were prepared to believe all manner of mythical grandeurs. The more remarkable and more superior people could make out their heroes to be, the less humility they felt in worshipping them. And since their heroes were creatures in whom they recognized a glorification of their own virtues, the more self-flattering it was to increase this glorification. They were able to worship themselves with abandon in the splendors they attributed to their chosen superiors. Thus when they started they went the limit, heaping honors and honors upon a man until he became a glittering God-like person. The country at the time of Aubrey's ascent was full of such glittering God-like creatures whose names were continually in people's mouths and in their newspapers. The instinct of inferiority demanding, as always, an outlet in the invention of gods, had found a tireless medium for this hocus-pocus in the press. Great reputations were continually springing up--the newspapers like the half-cynical, half-superstitious priests of the totem era busying themselves with creating towering effigies in clay and smearing them with vermillion paints. These gods whom people busily erected and before whom they busily prostrated themselves were, as always, the awesome deities created in their own image. There had been a crisis in Aubrey's life when he was caught between a desire to be himself and the desire to be a great clay figure with mysterious totems splashed over it. To be himself he had only to write as he vaguely thought he wanted to write. And to be one of the great figures he had merely to write what he definitely knew would win him the respect of others. The decision, however, had been taken out of his hands. Aubrey's talent had not been of the sort that has for its parents a hatred of society and a derision of its surfaces. He had, indeed, fancied himself for a short time as desiring to adventure among the doubts and iconoclasms which distinguished the literature he had encountered during his college days. But the fancy had proved no more than an egoistic perversion of the true impulse in him. This, it soon developed, was a desire to impress himself upon people as their superior, not their antithesis.