ABSTRACT
Most people, at any rate most young people, know the feeling of a sudden humiliating recollection, when one goes hot all over and stops breathing for a moment. If in company I have told a story which was too long and failed to raise the expected laugh, or which was tactless in view of some person’s presence, I am apt to wake up in the middle of the night with a hot feeling of shame, of which the cause for a moment escapes me and then suddenly rushes back into memory. The same sort of thing happens when one has been ignorant of something one ought to have known, and more particularly if one has failed to recognise a person who is hurt at being forgotten. I suspect that Lord Rolle, who rolled down the steps of the throne at Queen Victoria’s coronation, could never after hear about rolling without a blush.22 I still remember with a profound sense of guilt an occasion on which I forgot a dinner engagement and remembered just as I had finished my own dinner. I rushed round, arriving very late, and tried to eat a second dinner, which I found to be an agonising torture. To the young and shy the recollection of social faux pas is a misery which makes society much more painful than solitude.
