was only the fair thing to tell Mabel about several girls I
had been sweet on before I knew her. Would you believe it, she burst
into tears, and upbraided me with my brutality; and she brings up that
ill-advised disclosure against me to this day. I know several ladies who
will not lie, under ordinary circumstances--not for the mere pleasure of
it, at least; Clarice, for instance, and Jane, I believe; but not one
who will tell the whole truth, or forgive you for telling it. Well,
well, we have to take them as they are, and make the best of them: they
have other redeeming traits, as Jane says of me. In heaven these
inequalities will be done away, and one can afford to speak out--at
least I hope so. But meantime you can see how these feminine
peculiarities hamper a man, and check his natural candor, and impose on
him a wholly new, or at least a hugely modified, ethical code. If I were
to follow my original bent, which was uncommonly direct and guileless, I
should be in hot water all the time. It is this struggle between nature
and--well, I can hardly call it grace; let us say necessity, or
environment--which is making me bald, and fat, and aging me so fast. You
have seen, in the course of this narrative, what scrapes I have gotten
into by speaking before I stopped to think, and blurting out the simple
truth. I was once as honest as they are ever made--and for practical and
domestic uses nearly an idiot. I have been obliged, actually forced, to
deny myself the indulgence of a virtue, and diligently to cultivate the
opposite vice. The preachers don't know everything: I could give them
points. I don't say I have succeeded remarkably, and the exercise has
been deeply painful to me; but it was absolutely essential, if I was to
be fit for the family circle, and able to do or get any good in this
imperfect world. There is no escape, unless you live in a hermitage like
Hartman. You may have noticed that my loved ones sometimes appear to
treat me with less than absolute respect and confidence: it is the
result of this life-conflict, which has left me with a character mixed,
and in one respect wrecked. But they would think much worse of me than
they do if I told them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, on all occasions. Thus I might--and then again I might not--go to
our poor Princess, and say, "Clarice, Mabel and Jane think I ought to
see Hartman. I think so too, and they report you as concurring in the
verdict. T