There was a man I used to know whose business it was to succeed in life, and who had made a profession of this from the age of nineteen. His father had left him a fortune of about £600 a year, which he still possesses, but, with that exception, he has been made by the gods a sort of puffball for their amusement, the sort of thing they throw about the room. It was before his father’s death that a determination was taken to make him the land agent at the house of a cousin, who would give him a good salary, and it was arranged, as is the custom in that trade, that he should do nothing in return but dine, smoke, and ride about. The next step was easy. He would be put into Parliament, and then, by quiet, effective speaking and continual voting, he would become a statesman, and so grow more and more famous, and succeed more and more, and marry into the fringes of one of the great families, and then die. To this happy prospect was his future turned when he set out, not upon the old mare but upon the new Arab which his father had foolishly bought as an experiment, to visit his cousin’s home and to make the last arrangements. And note in what follows that every step in the success-business came off, and yet somehow the sum total was disappointing, and at the present moment one can very definitely say that he has not succeeded. He set out, I say, upon the new Arab, going gently along the sunken road that leads to the Downs, when a man carrying a faggot at the end of a pitchfork seemed to that stupid beast a preternatural apparition, and it shied forward and sideways like a knight’s move, so that the Unfortunate Man fell off heavily and hurt himself dreadfully. When the Arab had done this it stood with its beautiful tail arched out, and its beautiful neck arched also, looking most pitifully at its fallen rider, and with a sadness in its eye like that of the horse in the Heliodorus. The Unfortunate Man got on again, feeling but a slight pain in the right shoulder. But what I would particularly have you know is this: that the pain has never wholly disappeared, and is perhaps a little worse now after twenty years than it has been at any previous time. Moreover, he has spent quite £350 in trying to have it cured, and he has gone to foreign watering-places, and has learnt all manner of names, how that according to one man it is rheumatism, and according to another it is suppressed gout, and according to another a lesion. But the point to him is the pain, and this endures.