Successful men are usually trying persons to know well. Lambs, asses, and chickens do not associate happily with lions, wolves, and hawks--nor do birds and beasts of prey get on well with one another. Norman was regarded as "difficult" by his friends--by those of them who happened to get into the path of his ambition, in front of instead of behind him, and by those who fell into the not unnatural error of misunderstanding his good nature and presuming upon it. His clients regarded him as insolent. The big businesses, seeking the rich spoils of commerce, frequent highly perilous waters. They need skillful pilots. Usually these lawyer-pilots "know their place" and put on no airs upon the quarter-deck while they are temporarily in command. Not so Norman. He took the full rank, authority--and emoluments--of commander. And as his power, fame, and income were swiftly growing, it is fair to assume that he knew what he was about. He was admired--extravagantly admired--by young men with not too broad a vein of envy. He was no woman hater--anything but that. Indeed, those who wished him ill had from time to time hoped to see him tumble down, through miscalculation in some of his audacities with women. No--he did not hate women. But there were several women who hated him--or tried to; and if wounded vanity and baffled machination be admitted as just causes for hatred, they had cause. He liked--but he did not wholly trust. When he went to sleep, it was not where Delilah could wield the shears. A most irritating prudence--irritating to friends and intimates of all degrees and kinds, in a race of beings with a mania for being trusted implicitly but with no balancing mania for deserving trust of the implicit variety. And he ate hugely--and whatever he pleased. He could drink beyond belief, all sorts of things, with no apparent ill effect upon either body or brain. He had all the appetites developed abnormally, and abnormal capacity for gratifying them. Where there was one man who envied him his eminence, there were a dozen who envied him his physical capacities. We cannot live and act without doing mischief, as well as that which most of us would rather do, provided that in the doing we are not ourselves undone. Probably in no direction did Norman do so much mischief as in unconsciously leading men of his sets down town and up to imitate his colossal dissipations--which were not dissipation for him who was abnormal.