"'I don't suppose you have ever seen it, Iris, but there is a kind
of similarity between Antony and me. It's got nothing to do with body
and surface, nor, as far as any one can see, with our points of view
about anything. But there it is and has always been--and I can only
express it by saying that the foundations of our minds must be the
same; that--and can you believe it?--our real inclinations of mind
are the same, or rather Antony's have always been the same as mine.
There's nothing very extravagant or uncommon about that, two men _may_
very easily be made that way--if Antony weren't so obviously the man
he is, the child he was! But you can see the curious absurdity of such
a likeness from even what you know of him--why, his very voice and
face, everything about him, shout out that his inclinations are as
far from mine as one man's can be from another's! And even as a child
he seemed every bit as different from me, a roystering child to be
a roystering man--and so you can imagine how very impossible it was
for the one child to discover the secret of the other's dislike. For
that dislike came from a strange jealousy, and the jealousy from that
similarity--and all so confused and overlaid by every trait that can
make one man different from another that the devil himself, though he
had put the fantasy there, would have been hard driven to find it. And
the fantasies that grip men's minds and destroy them are like mists, it
is in their nature to be bodiless yet to obscure: they are like mists
that come upon a field in the morning, no one knows whence, and fade no
one knows whither, to come again as mysteriously in the evening. And so
this jealousy had come upon my Antony--but from where, just where and
why? To cloud a baby man's mind with hatred and beastly things....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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