Neville's answer to the man who is behind the eight-ball because no one ever believed he would be anything other than what he is. His mother took each of her sons aside separately and persuaded him that he was her favourite and that he would never let her down - you're going to make mother very proud of you, aren't you? - and naturally you say, yes, mother. She would curl his long white curls, push her finger in the curl, kiss him and send him on his way; then the next one came to have his hair curled. She told the same story to everyone. None of them ever compared notes, and the reason Neville gives is the best detail in it: because it was mother's secret you couldn't violate mother's secret, and they were not going to set a little enmity among the brothers by telling the others they were the favourite. So each grew into manhood believing he was the favourite. It came out only after twelve years in America, over cocktails on the veranda, when it surfaced in some spontaneous way and everyone told the same story - and mother just sat there and chuckled. She had simply accomplished her purpose: she got over to them the feeling of being important. She did not expect them to make a fortune, only to be something of which she would be proud, and in their own separate spheres they became a success in her eyes before she departed this world. At least two lectures (1830, 2047), where the frame is repeated: many a man is a failure today because no one ever believed he could be otherwise. PROVENANCE: coined out of chronological sequence at the request of the attacher lane (PM 6100/6118), which searched the corpus for Neville's Barbados family stories and found this one carried by no motif. The reader has not read the home lecture in full; the canonical passage and the other tellings were supplied by the attacher and the reading is drawn from the passage text alone. Confidence 0.95 rather than 0.99 for that reason. The attacher will attach the remaining tellings.