hat's just what
I'm telling you. Now, you take my advice, and hold your tongue. Then
perhaps you'll get a husband; and if you do, make things comfortable
for him. Men can't abide women who don't make things comfortable."

"Well," said Beth temperately, "I don't think I could 'abide' a man
who didn't make things comfortable."

Jim grunted, as though that point of view were a different thing
altogether.

By degrees Beth discovered that sisters did not hold at all the same
sort of place in Jim's estimation as "the girls." The girls were other
people's sisters, to whom Jim was polite, and whom he even fawned on
and flattered while they were present, but made most disparaging
remarks about and ridiculed behind their backs; to his own sisters, on
the contrary, he was habitually rude, but he always spoke of them
nicely in their absence, and even boasted about their accomplishments.

"Your brother Jim says you can act anything," Charlotte Hardy, the
doctor's daughter, told Beth. "And you recite wonderfully, although
you've never heard any one recite; and you talk like a grown-up
person."

Beth flushed with surprise and pleasure at this; but her heart had
hardly time to expand before she observed the puzzling discrepancy
between what Jim said to her and what he had been saying to other
people, and found it impossible to reconcile the two, so as to have
any confidence in Jim's sincerity.

Before the end of the holidays she had learned to enjoy Jim's
companionship, but she had no respect for his opinions at all. He had
taught her a good deal, however. He had taught her, for one thing, the
futility of discussion with people of his capacity. The small
intellect should be treated like the small child--with tenderest
consideration. It must not hear too much of anything at a time, and
there are certain things that it must never be told at all. Simple
familiar facts, with obvious little morals, are the right food for it,
and constant repetition of what it knows is safe; but such heavy
things as theories, opinions, and arguments must be kept carefully
concealed from it, for fear of causing congestion or paralysis, or,
worse still, that parlous condition which betrays itself in
distressing symptoms such as one sees daily in society, or sits and
shudders at in one's own friends, when the victim, swelling with
importance, makes confident mis-statements, draws erroneous
conclusions, sums up and gives advice so fatuous that you blush