Felo De Se? by R. Austin Freeman — Read

OF CERTAIN MEN WE ARE apt to say that once seen they are never forgotten. They are not mere samples of the human race, turned out from the common mould, but executed individually as special orders and never repeated. Such were Paganini and the great Duke of Wellington, recognisable by us all from their mere counterfeit presentments after the lapse of a century.

Now Mr. Ethelbert Snuper was exactly the reverse. He might have been seen a thousand times and never remembered. So exactly was he like every other ordinary person that he might have come straight out of a text-book of "The Dismal Science " -- the Economic Man, now for the first and only time enjoying a concrete existence. Often as I met him, I recognised him with doubt. And the worst of it was that when at last I thought that I had committed his impersonality to memory, behold! the very next time I met him he was somebody else. It was quite confusing. There was a sort of unreality about the man. His very name was incredible, so exactly did it define his status and his "place in Nature," (but one meets with these coincidences in real life. I once knew a ritualist clergyman named Mummery).