h business--if we would not think too much about it. We need not
pride ourselves on our griefs; it seems as though joy were the higher
state because it is the less self-conscious and rests in fuller harmony
with the great order that encircles us.

As I grew older I gained a new and abiding source of pleasure in the
contemplation and study of my sister Victoria. I have anticipated
matters a little in telling of my tutor's departure; I must hark back
and pick up the thread of Victoria's history from the time when I was
hard on thirteen and she near fifteen--the time when she had implored me
to rid her of Krak. I had hated Krak with that healthy full-blooded
antipathy whose faculty one seems to lose in later years. It is a
tiresome thing to be driven by experience to the discovery of some good
in everybody; your fine black fades to neutral gray; often I regret the
delightfully partial views of earlier days. And so many people succeed
in preserving them to a green and untutored old age! They are Popes
always to their heretics. Such was and is Victoria; she never changed in
her views of other people. In contrast she was, as regards herself, of a
temperament so elastic that impressions endured hardly a moment beyond
the blow, and pleasures passed without depositing any residuum which
might form a store against evil days. If Krak had cut her arm off, its
perpetual absence might have made Victoria remember the fault which was
paid for by amputation; the moral effect of rapid knuckles disappeared
with the comfort that came from sucking them. Perhaps her disposition
was a happy chance for her; since the Styrian discipline (although not,
of course, in this blankly physical form later on) persisted for her
long after it had been softened for me. I touch again perhaps on a point
which has caught my attention before; undoubtedly my mother kept the
status of childhood imposed on Victoria fully as long as nature
countenanced the measures. Krak did not go; a laugh greeted my hint.
Krak stayed till Victoria was sixteen. For my part, since it was
inevitable that Krak should discipline somebody, I think heaven was mild
in setting her on Victoria. Had I stayed under her sway I should have
run mad. Victoria laughed, cried, joked, dared, submitted, offended,
defied, suffered, wept, and laughed again all in a winter's afternoon.
She was by way of putting on the dignity of an elder with me and
shutting off from my gaze her trials and reverses. B