MYSELF: Yes, but I should have made it clear that I very rarely met him. I just heard about him from Netty. He was so deserving and he had his way to make in the world single-handed, and he would have been so glad of some of the chances I hardly seemed to notice, and all that sort of thing. Matey’s struggle to qualify as a Chartered Accountant pretty much paralleled my own studies for the Bar, but of course in Netty’s eyes everything had been made easy for me, whereas he did it the hard way. Meritorious Matey! But when I met him, which was as seldom as decency allowed, I always thought he was a loathsome little squirt—

DR VON HALLER: I know. We went into that quite extensively. But in the end we agreed, I think, that you simply read into Matey’s character things you disliked, and these proved after some more investigation to be things which were not wholly absent from your own character. Isn’t that so?

MYSELF: It’s difficult for me to be objective about Matey. When I talk about him I feel myself becoming waspish, and I can’t help describing him as if he were some sort of Dickensian freak. But is it my fault he has damp hands and a bad breath and shows his gums when he smiles and calls me Ted, which nobody else on God’s green earth does, and exudes democratic forgiveness of my wealth and success—

DR VON HALLER: Yes, yes: we were through all that, and at last you admitted that Matey was your scapegoat—a type of all you disliked and feared might come to the surface in yourself—please, one moment—not in these physical characteristics but in the character of the Deserving Person, ill rewarded and ill understood by a careless world. The Orphan of the Storm: the Battered Baby. You don’t have to blush for harbouring something of this in your most secret image of yourself. The important thing is to know what you are doing. That tends to defuse it, you understand. I was not trying during those difficult hours to make you like Matey. I was trying to persuade you to examine a dark corner of yourself.

MYSELF: It was humiliating, but I suppose it must be true.

DR VON HALLER: The truth will grow as we work. That is what we are looking for. The truth, or some part of it.

MYSELF: But although I admit I projected some of the least admirable things in my own character on Matey—you notice how I am picking up words like “projected” from you—I have a hunch that there is something fishy about him. He’s too good to be true.

DR VON HALLER: I am not surprised. Unless one is very naïve, one does not project one’s own evil on people who are especially good. As I have said, if psychiatry worked by rules, every policeman would be a psychiatrist. But let us get back to Felix.