I can remember a
good deal. I have heard polished gentlemen lie, at a pinch, like the
proverbial pick-pocket, and pretty ladies fib as well as servant-girls.
Of course, I do not mean to say that as many ladies as servant-girls
tell untruths. But Eleanor would fain believe that the lie which Solomon
discovered to be "continually on the lips of the untaught" is not on the
lips of those who "know better" at all. As to dishonesty, too, I should
be sorry to say that customers cheat as much as shopkeepers, but I do
think that many people who ought to "know better" seem to forget that
their honour as well as their interest is concerned in every bargain.
The question then arises, do people in our rank know so much better on
these points of moral conduct than those below them? If Eleanor and her
parents are "old-fashioned" (and the boys think us quite behind the
times), I fancy, that perhaps high principle and a nice sense of honour
are not so well taught now as they used to be. Noble sentiments are not
the fashion. The very phrase provokes a smile of ridicule. But I do not
know whether the habit of uttering ignoble ones in "chaff" does not at
last bring the tone of mind down to the low level. It is so terribly
easy to be mean, and covetous, and selfish, and cowardly untrue, if the
people by whose good opinion one's character lives will comfortably
confess that they also "look out for themselves," and "take care of
Number One," and think "money's the great thing in this world," and hold
"the social lie" to be a necessary part of social intercourse. I know
that once or twice it has happened that young people with whom we have
been thrown have said things which have made high-principled Eleanor
stand aghast in honourable horror; and that that speechless indignation
of hers has been as much lost upon them as the touch of a feather on the
hide of a rhinoceros. Eleanor is more impatient than I am on such
subjects. I who have been trained in more than one school myself, am
sorry for those who have never known the higher teaching. Eleanor thinks
that modesty, delicacy of mind and taste, and uprightness in word and
deed, are innate in worthy characters. Where she finds them absent, she
is apt to dilate her nostrils, and say, in that low, emphatic voice
which is her excited tone, "There are some things that you cannot _put
into_ anybody!" and so turn her back for ever on the offender. Or, as
she once said to a friend of the boys, who was