Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

Now, when in cold blood and at a distance of many years I look back on the simple incident which gave rise to the whole catastrophic chain of events, I must, in justice to myself, affirm that I blundered entirely innocently into the unfortunate error; even the cleverest and most sophisticated of mortals might have committed the gaffe of asking a crippled girl to dance with him. But in the first rush of horror I thought of myself not merely as an arrant bungler, but as a cad, a criminal. I felt as though I had struck an innocent child with a whip. The whole thing could, after all, have been put right with a little presence of mind; it was only by rushing away then and there like a criminal, without making any attempt to apologize—no sooner had I felt the first breath of cold air on my face outside the front door than this was immediately obvious to me—that I had irrevocably made a mess of the whole thing.