r to have me
always on my knees about it. All that I could think of to say about her
graceful handiness and her delicate needle-work has been said so often,
and is so well understood, that it has entirely lost the zest of
originality. Marianne and I have had sundry little battles, in which the
victory came out on both sides, each of us thinking the better of the
other for the vigor and spirit with which we conducted matters; and our
habit of perfect plain-speaking and truth-telling to each other is
better than all the delicacies that ever were hatched up in the hot-bed
of French sentiment."

"Perfectly true, perfectly right," said I. "Every word good as gold.
Truth before all things; sincerity before all things: pure, clear,
diamond-bright sincerity is of more value than the gold of Ophir; the
foundation of all love must rest here. How those people do who live in
the nearest and dearest intimacy with friends who they believe will lie
to them for any purpose, even the most refined and delicate, is a
mystery to me. If I once know that my wife or my friend will tell me
only what they think will be agreeable to me, then I am at once lost, my
way is a pathless quicksand. But all this being premised, I still say
that we Anglo-Saxons might improve our domestic life, if we would graft
upon the strong stock of its homely sincerity the courteous graces of
the French character.

"If anybody wishes to know exactly what I mean by this, let him read the
Memoir of De Tocqueville, whom I take to be the representative of the
French ideal man; and certainly the kind of family life which his
domestic letters disclose has a delicacy and a beauty which adorn its
solid worth.

"What I have to say on this matter is, that it is very dangerous for any
individual man or any race of men continually to cry up the virtues to
which they are constitutionally inclined, and to be constantly dwelling
with reprobation on faults to which they have no manner of temptation.

"I think that we of the English race may set it down as a general rule
that we are in no danger of becoming hypocrites in domestic life through
an extra sense of politeness, and in some danger of becoming boors from
a rough, uncultivated instinct of sincerity. But to bring the matter to
a practical point, I will specify some particulars in which the courtesy
we show to strangers might with advantage be grafted into our home-life.

"In the first place, then, let us watch our course