In this matter we exhibit a special sensibility that may be compared to the tropisms which push plants up toward the light or make them struggle against gravitation. We go toward some and flee from others, regardless of our interests or our prejudices. The man whose companionship we seek because it stimulates us is not necessarily he who strives to give us a good opinion of ourselves. Often he is taciturn, sometimes surly, occasionally ironical and cutting. Nevertheless, there emanates from his whole person something like approbation, a confession of confidence. Even if he insists, harshly, noisily, upon calling attention to our faults, he does not make us despair of ourselves and our future. And if he never speaks to us about ourselves we yet know, by some imperceptible gesture, by some tone in his voice, by a gleam in his eye, that he is interested in us. Every time we leave him we like him better, we like ourselves better, we like all humanity better, we look at everything with a smile, we are as full of plans as a tree in April. The other sort of man, on the contrary, is forever deluding himself. He pursues before our very eyes an end which we see, with grief and bitterness, he regularly fails to attain. Whatever he does, whatever he says, he always shows us that he is a stranger to us, that he is superior and that we do not interest him. Even in his manner of wishing to give us his attention, he exhibits a certain difficulty in seeing us at all. If he tries to seem talkative, important, majestic, his natural gifts turn against him; his cordiality disgusts us, his bearing irritates us, his self-importance makes us want to laugh. We cannot forgive him anything, and especially the fact that we always leave him with the same vague depression, the same disgust of life, and the same distrust of our own undertakings. What we are always escapes him, and although what he is does not escape us, we are discouraged by him all the same. We must be the first of these two men, he who is, amid all things, in spite of all things, a rich man, he whom the poet of the _Livre d’amour_ justly called “a conqueror.” XII You must not violate your gifts, you must simply study their possibilities. It is what we do with trees and animals in which we are able to instil virtues they do not seem to possess at all naturally.