," she continued,
after a moment, "between ourselves, I think you are--how shall I say?--a
little--" And Mrs. Manhattan touched her forehead and nodded
significantly.

"I? Not a bit."

"So much the worse, then. It would be an excuse. Now listen to me. They
say that when a woman gets to be thirty the first thing she does is to
ignore her age, and that by the time she is forty it has escaped her
memory entirely. I am not forty yet, but I am old enough--well, I am old
enough to be wiser than you, and I say this--you can contradict it as
much as you please, but I will say it all the same--you have more pride
in yourself than love for your husband."

"Which means?"

"I mean this, that when pride gets the upper hand, love is bound to be
throttled. In some, pride is a screen; behind it they rage at their
ease: in others it is a bag of wind; prick it and behold, a tempest.
With you, just at present, it is a screen; haven't I seen you torment
your rings ever since I came in? Well, torment them, but for goodness
sake don't change the screen into a balloon. There is nothing as bad
form as that, and nothing as ineffectual. My dear, if you want to keep
your husband, think of yourself not first, but last, or, if you can't
think in that way, act as though you did."

"And be a hypocrite."

"Eden, you are impossible. Be a hypocrite? Why, of course you must be a
hypocrite. Hypocrisy is Christianity's most admirable invention. Banish
it, and what do you find? Not skeletons in the closet, but catacombs of
distasteful things. No, Eden, be a hypocrite. We all are; everyone
prefers it. There was a man once who got up in the morning with the idea
of telling everybody the truth. By sunset he was safe in an asylum.
People don't want the truth; they content themselves with sighing for
it; they know very well that when they get in its way, it bites. It is
vicious, truth is. It makes us froth at the mouth. If you haven't had
the forethought to cuirass yourself with indifference, truth can cause a
hydrophobia for which the only Pasteur is time. No, hypocrisy has had
the sanction of pope and prelate. Let us hold to it; let us hold to what
we may and not try to prove anything."

"What are you talking about then?"

"How irritating you are, Eden! I am talking about you. I am trying to
give you some advice. No one gave me any. I had to gather it on the way.
I come here, and finding you melancholy as a comic paper, I try to offer
the fruit of t