staying with us, in the
heat of argument, "I supposed that honourable men, like poets, are born,
not made." I, indeed, do believe these qualities to be in great measure
inherited; but I believe them also to come of training, and to be more
easily lost than Eleanor will allow. She has only lived in one moral
atmosphere. I think that the standard of a family or a social circle
falls but too easily; and in all humbleness of mind, I say that I have
reason to believe that in this respect, as in other matters, elevation
and amendment are possible.

However, this is one of the many subjects we discuss, rocking and pacing
the kitchen to the howling of the wind. We have confessed that our
experience is very small, and our opinions still unfixed in the matter,
so it is unlikely that I shall settle it to my own, or anybody's
satisfaction, in the pages of this biography.]

To return to Aunt Theresa. She was, as I said, honest. She chose a good
moment for our sale; but she did not "doctor" the things. For the credit
of the regiment, I feel ashamed to confess that everybody was not so
scrupulous. One lady sat in our drawing-room, with twenty-five pounds'
worth of lace upon her dress, and congratulated herself on having sold
some toilette-china as sound, of which she had daintily doctored two
fractures with an invaluable cement. The pecuniary gain may have been
half-a-crown. The loss in self-respect she did not seem to estimate.
Aunt Theresa would not have done it herself, but she laughed
encouragingly. It is difficult to be strait-laced with a lady who had so
much old point, and whose silks are so stiff that she can rustle down
your remonstrances. Another friend, a young officer whose personal
extravagance was a proverb even at a station in India, boasted for a
week of having sold a rickety knick-knack shelf to a man who was going
off to the hills for five-and-twenty rupees when it was not worth six. I
have heard him swear at tailors, servants, and subordinates of all
kinds, for cheating. I do not think it ever dawned upon his mind that
common honesty was a virtue in which he himself was wanting. As to Mrs.
Minchin's tales on this subject--but Mrs. Minchin's tales were not to be
relied upon.

It was about this time that Mrs. Minchin and the bride quarrelled. In a
few weeks after her arrival, the bride knew all the ladies of the
regiment and the society of the station, and then showed little
inclination to be bear-led by Mrs. Minch