In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I&rsquo;ve been turning over in my mind ever since.<br />&ldquo;Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,&rdquo; he told me, &ldquo;just remember that all the people in this world haven&rsquo;t had the advantages that you&rsquo;ve had.&rdquo;<br />He didn&rsquo;t say any more, but we&rsquo;ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I&rsquo;m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought&mdash;frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.