I'm glad I'm successful because of Barty, although success, which brings the world to our feet, does not always endear us to the friend of our bosom. If I had been a failure Barty would have stuck to me like a brick, I feel sure, instead of my sticking to him like a leech! And the sight of his success might have soured me--that eternal chorus of praise, that perpetual feast of pudding in which I should have had no part but to take my share as a mere guest, and listen and look on and applaud, and wish I'd never been born! As it is, I listened and looked on and clapped my hands with as much pride and pleasure as if Barty had been my son--and my share of the pudding never stuck in my throat! I should have been always on the watch to take him down a peg when he was pleased with himself--to hold him cheap and overpraise some duffer in his hearing--so that I might save my own self-esteem; to pay him bad little left-handed compliments, him and his, whenever I was out of humor; and I should have been always out of humor, having failed in life. And then I should have gone home wretched--for I have a conscience--and woke up in the middle of the night and thought of Barty; and what a kind, genial, jolly, large-minded, and generous-hearted old chap he was and always had been--and buried my face in my pillow, and muttered: "Ach! what a poor, mean, jealous beast I am--un fruit sec! un malheureux raté!" With all my success, this life-long exclusive cultivation of Barty's society, and that of his artistic friends, which has somehow unfitted me for the society of my brother-merchants of wine--and most merchants of everything else--has not, I regret to say, quite fitted me to hold my own among the "leaders of intellectual modern thought," whose company I would fain seek and keep in preference to any other. My very wealth seems to depress and disgust them, as it does me--and I'm no genius, I admit, and a poor conversationalist. To amass wealth is an engrossing pursuit--and now that I have amassed a good deal more than I quite know what to do with, it seems to me a very ignoble one. It chokes up everything that makes life worth living; it leaves so little time for the constant and regular practice of those ingenuous arts which faithfully to have learned is said to soften the manners, and make one an agreeable person all round. It is even more _abrutissant_ than the mere pursuit of sport or pleasure. How many a noble lord I know who's almost as beastly rich as myself, and twice as big a fool by nature, and perhaps not a better fellow at bottom--yet who can command the society of all there is of the best in science, literature, and art! Not but what they will come and dine with me fast enough, these shining lights of culture and intellect--my food is very good, although I say it, and I get noble lords to meet them.