Hilly Brown was trying to cope with the idea that, for the first time in his life, he had failed at something he really wanted to do. He had been pleased with the applause and congratulations, and he was not so self-deprecating as to mistake honest praise for politeness... but there was a stony part of him - the part which, under other circumstances, might have made him a great artist - which was not satisfied with honest praise. Honest praise, this stony part insisted, was what the bunglers of the world heaped on the heads of the barely competent.

In short, honest praise was not enough.

Hilly did not think all this in such adult terms, of course ... but he did think it. If his mother had known his thoughts, she would have been very angry with him for his pride ... which, her Bible taught her, went before a fall. Certainly she would have been angrier with him than she'd been the time he nearly slid into the road in front of the Webber Fuel truck, or the time he tried to give Victor a bubble bath in the toilet bowl. What do you want, Hilly? she would have cried, throwing up her hands. Dishonest praise?

Ev, who saw much, and David, who saw more, could have told her.

He wanted to make their eyes get so big they looked like they were going to fall out. He wanted to make the girls scream and the boys yell. He wanted to make everyone laugh when Victor came out of the hat with a ribbon in his tail and a chocolate coin in his mouth. He would have traded all the honest praise and genuine applause in the world for just one scream, one belly-laugh, one woman fainting dead away like the booklet says they did when Harry Houdini did his famous milk-can escape. Because honest praise means you only got good. When they scream and laugh and faint, that means you got great.

But he suspected - no, he knew - that he was never going to get great, and all the want in the world would not change that fact. It was a bitter blow. Not the failure itself so much as the knowing it couldn't be changed. It was like the end of Santa Claus, in a way.

So, while his parents believed his lapse of interest to be just another shift in the capricious spring wind that blows through most childhoods, it was, in fact, the result of Hilly's first adult conclusion: If he was never going to get great at magic, he ought to put the set away. He couldn't leave it around and just do a trick now and then as a hobby. His failure hurt too badly for that. It was a bad equation. Best to erase it and try a new one.

If adults could put aside their obsessions with such firmness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. Robertson Davies does not say that in his Deptford Trilogy ... but he strongly hints at it.

-Stephen King, The Tommyknockers