opposite" in
particular, "There! that's _our_ family disgrace! Everybody's got one.
What's _yours_?" I believe that this method would shut most people up
quite satisfactorily. People only try to learn what they believe you do
not want them to know. If you push the truth before them, they turn away
their heads. To pretend is usually useless. Not very many of us get
through life without experiencing a desire to hide something which
everybody has already seen. Wiser far be honest, even if it costs you a
disagreeable quarter of an hour. Better one disagreeable quarter of an
hour than months and years sitting on a bombshell which any passer-by can
explode. Honesty is always one of the very few invulnerable things. No
pin-pricks can pierce it--and pin-pricks are usually the bane of life.
It's like laughter, in that nobody has yet been found to parry its blows
successfully. Shame is a sure sign of possible defeat--and the world
always ranges itself every time on the side of the probable victor. If
you once show people that you _can't_ be hurt in the way they are trying
to hurt you, they soon leave off trying, and begin to think of your
Christian virtues in general and their own more numerous ones in
particular. It's only when your courage is sheer camouflage that the
world tries to penetrate the disguise. Not until a woman dips her hair
in henna and, metaphorically speaking, cries, "See how young I look now!"
that other women begin to remark, "You know, dear, she is _not so
youthful as she was_!" It's only when the rumour goes round that a man
has had a financial misfortune that everybody to whom he owes anything
fling in their bills. And thus it is with family skeletons. If, as it
were, you ask them to live with you downstairs, everybody ignores them
and finds them "frightfully dull." But the moment you relegate them into
the topmost attic--lo and behold, every single one of your acquaintances
expresses a desire to rush upstairs, ostensibly to look at the view.

Everybody has something which they do not want to expose--like dirty
linen. But everybody's linen gets dirty--that is always something to
remember. There are some poor old fools, however, who really do seem to
imagine that they and theirs are alone immaculate. How they manage to do
so I can never for the life of me imagine. They must be very stupid.
But stupid people are a very great factor in life's everyday, and we must
always try to do somethi