"So much the better for you. Let
them go to the eighty black years. Don't run after him. Just do as I
tell you and you'll be all right, Levinsky. My advice has never got
you in trouble, has it?"
"Indeed not. Indeed not," I answered
Max's blindness to what was going on between Dora and myself
was a riddle to which I vainly sought a solution. That this cynic
who charged every man and woman with immorality should, in
the circumstances, be so absolutely undisturbed in his confidence
regarding his wife seemed nothing short of a miracle. When I now
think of the riddle I see its solution in a modified version of the
old rule concerning the mote in thy neighbor's eye and the beam in
thine own eve. Your worst pessimist is, after all, an optimist with
regard to himself. We are quick to recognize the gravity of ill
health in somebody else, yet we ourselves may be on the very
brink of death without realizing it. It is a special phase of
selfishness. We are loath to connect the idea of a catastrophe with
our own person. Max, who saw a mote in the eye of everybody
else's wife, failed to perceive the beam in the eye of his own
As for Sadie, who lived in the same house now, and who visited
Dora's apartment at all hours, she was too silly and too deeply
infatuated with her friend to suspect her of anything wrong
I idolized Dora.
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