I was exactly the sort of son that my father ought not to have had: in modern parlance he had no use for me. His son should have resembled himself, and should have been able to go on where he left off. As for me, I was of no good at the business, and of still less in politics: I could neither turn his thousands into tens of thousands, nor his baronetcy into a peerage; for I was endowed with a fatal capacity for sitting still. If that above-mentioned mistake of Nature had not been made, and Annabel had been the boy, imagination fails to depict the heights to which she might not have risen with her father's wealth and position for a leaping-board: for, like her father, Annabel was dowered with the gift of Success, whilst I had the gift of Failure. It is strange how some people, of whom I, alas! am one, possess the capacity to fail in whatsoever they undertake. I do not think it is altogether a fault, as we cannot help it: it seems rather an inherent quality, such as height or size or complexion. Even in childhood Annabel's things always turned out well, and mine turned out badly. Her garden blossomed like the rose, while mine was more or less a desert place, though I worked in it quite as hard as she: her white mice were ornaments to society, while mine grew into rats and had to be destroyed; her birthdays were invariably fine, while mine, equally invariably, turned to rain. When I was young this quality of failure terribly distressed and depressed me; but age--or rather middle age--brings, in exchange for the many things it takes away, the gift of philosophy; and by the time I was forty I accepted the fact that I was a failure with much the same resignation that I accepted the facts that I was short-sighted and too narrow in the shoulders for my height. True, I was now and again haunted by the feeling that I had lived in a backwater, and had never tasted the living waters, nor felt the fierce swirl of the river of life as it rushed by on its headlong course, and that I was getting too old now ever to taste and to feel these things; but this regret was soon smothered by the beauty of my backwater, and my contentment in the lot which had been ordained for me.