a taste for finding them out?"

"Do you not find both in children, and up into old age?"

"In children, one usually finds both: but I think the love of
mystery-making and surprises goes off as people grow wiser. Fanny and
Mary were plotting all last week how to take their sister Sophia by
surprise with a piece of India-rubber, a token of fraternal affection,
as they were pleased to call it; and you see George has a secret to-day:
but they will have fewer hidings and devices every year: and, if they
grow really wise, they will find that, amidst the actual business of
life, there is so much more safety, and ease, and blessing in perfect
frankness than in any kind of concealment, that they will give
themselves the liberty and peace of being open as the daylight. Such is
my hope for them. But all this need not prevent their delighting in the
mysteries which are not of man's making."

"They will be all the more at leisure for them," said Margaret, "from
having their minds free from plots and secrets."

"Surely you are rather hard upon arts and devices," said Philip.
"Without more or fewer of them, we should make our world into a Palace
of Truth,--see the Veillees du Chateau, which Matilda is reading with
Miss Young. Who ever read it, that did not think the Palace of Truth
the most disagreeable place in the world?"

"And why?" asked Margaret. "Not because the people in it spoke truth;
but because the truth which they spoke was hatred, and malice, and
selfishness."

"And how much better," inquired Hester, "is the truth that we should
speak, if we were as true as the daylight? I hope we shall always be
allowed to make mysteries of our own selfish and unkind fancies. There
would be little mutual respect left if these things were told."

"I think there would be more than ever," said Margaret, carefully
avoiding to meet her sister's eye. "I think so many mistakes would be
explained, so many false impressions set right, on the instant of their
being made, that our mutual relations would go on more harmoniously than
now."

"And what would you do with the affairs now dedicated to mystery?" asked
Mr Enderby. "How would you deal with diplomacy, and government, and
with courtship? You surely would not overthrow the whole art of wooing?
You would not doom lovers' plots and devices?"

The ladies were all silent. Mr Enderby, however, was determined to
have an answer. He addressed himself particularly to Margaret.