It is not, however, common to find people make such a frank and
candid confession of their superiority. The feeling is generally
kept for more or less private consumption. The underlying self-
satisfaction generally manifests itself, for instance, with people
who have no real illusions, say, about their personal appearance,
in leading them to feel, after a chance glance at themselves in a
mirror, that they really do not look so bad in certain lights. A
dull preacher will repeat to himself, with a private relish, a
sentence out of a very commonplace discourse of his own, and think
that that was really an original thought, and that he gave it an
impressive emphasis; or a student will make a very unimportant
discovery, press it upon the attention of some great authority on
the subject, extort a half-hearted assent, and will then go about
saying, "I mentioned my discovery to Professor A----; he was quite
excited about it, and urged the immediate publication of it." Or a
commonplace woman will give a tea-party, and plume herself upon the
eclat with which it went off.
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