Someone whose tendency toward self-aggrandizement snowballs.
Fainall: “Well, sure if I should live
to be rid of my wife, I should be a miserable man.”
Mrs. Marwood: “Aye!”
Fainall: “For having only that one hope, the accomplishment
of it, of consequence, must put an end to all my hopes; and what a wretch is he
who must survive his hopes! Nothing remains when that day comes, but to sit
down and weep like Alexander, when he wanted other worlds to conquer.”
William
Congreve, The Way of the World (1700).
