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For myself, I am just the right height no more, no less. I am five-feet-nine-and-a-half, and I wouldn't be a shade different either way. I dare say that is the general experience. Every one feels that his own is really the ideal standard. It is so in most things. Aristotle said that a man ought to marry at thirty-eight. I think he said it because he himself married at thirty-eight.
In short, he finds himself a nuisance in a world made for people of five-feet-nine-and-a-half. But he has one advantage over the small man. He does not have to ask for notice. The result is that while the little man often seems vain and pushful, the giant usually is very tame, and modest, and unobtrusive. The little man wants to be seen: the giant wants not to be seen.
But though I am the perfect height of five-feet-nine-and-a-half, I always feel depressed and out-classed in the presence of a man, say of six-feet-two. He may be an ass, but still I have to look up to him in a physical sense, and the mere act of looking up seems to endow him with a moral advantage.
I feel a grievance at the outrageous length of the fellow, and find I want to make him fully understand that though I am only five-feet-nine-and-a-half in stature, my intellectual measurement is about ten feet, and that I am looking down on him much more than he is looking down on me. It is this irksome self-consciousness that is the permanent affliction of the physically small man.
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