Excerpt from The Thief by Juni'chiro Tanizaki.

And if he won

that trust because he came from a wealthy family and was the son of a famous professor, then I could hardly avoid envying him. Just as his social status improved his moral character, so my own background — I was acutely conscious of being a scholarship student, the son of a poor farmer — debased mine. For me to feel a kind of awe in his presence had nothing to do with whether of not I was a thief. We did belong to different species. I felt that the more he trusted me, with his frank, open attitude, the more the gulf between us deepened. The more friendly we tried to be, joking with each other in apparent intimacy, gossiping and laughing together, the more the distance between us increased. There was nothing I could do about it.