7

Was I happy?

But afterall I ate extremely well. I wore the best clothes, and even when I was younger and still at school I had noticed how my poorer and shabilly dressed contemporaries habitually deferred to me and to others like me, treating us with a kind of flaterring diffidence which indicated their wiling acceptence of us like pricesses of fashions. I belonged to the elite, to that class of rich and envied persons whose birthright it is to look down on the poor, the unlucky and the envious with benevolent contempt.

Had I not every reason to be happy?