whose sensitive pride you are tenderly careful,
but whose gowns and bonnets are unmistakably
shabby, and your visitors a purse-proud
couple who will weigh them only according to
the money worth of their appearance; washing
day and everything pervaded by a smell of
soap and steam and soda; your teeth at the
dentist's—no one suspecting they are " dentist's
triumphs" at all; the off day of the hair dyeing,
when you are a mixture of purple and grey;
Christmas bills and papa in a state of fury and
effervescence; a case of mild scarlet fever in
the nursery, and you anxious to conceal the
fact yet not subject any one to danger; we can
imagine hundreds of instances in which no one
would like to tell the naked truth, and where
the naked truth would be quite unnecessary,
and indeed do more harm than good. Yet my
friends and combatants used to gravely assert
that "not at home" was an untruth utterly
inadmissible, and that "engaged" was the
nearest approach to a subterfuge possible to be
allowed.

Engaged! I wonder how many people would
take that for an answer? Some of course
would; the well-bred and the formal and the
timid and the reluctant—they would all murmur
the polite phrase proper to the occasion, and
drop their card into the servant's hand with the
stereotyped unmeaning smile, and the stereotyped
unmeaning regret; but there are dozens
of our robuster acquaintance who would constitute
themselves exceptions on the spot, saying,
complacently, "Oh, I am sure she will see
me!"

"Sarah, just go and tell Mrs. Brown that
it's only me, Mrs. Smith, of Camberwell,
and I'm sure she'll see me, if only for half a
minute."

"Engaged, is he? then go and say to him, will
you? that I shall not keep him long; my business
is very pressing, and indeed I must see him,
but I shall not detain him long"—(his business
being only a boring hour of personal gossip,
perfectly uninteresting and of no good to heaven
or humanity); and so on with the remainder of
the dozens. And then where would you be?
answer me that, Impracticables! where would
you and your engagements be, when assaulted
by your robust acquaintance and forced to
stand and deliver, or show fight and come to
blows? Oh, poor deluded moralists, who stand
out for the plain truth unmasked and intact,
and will not have so much as a rag of lacework
signifying nothing but a polite screen
between you and the outside world, is it truth,
think you, this high-handed refusal to acknowledge
that which is?—is it quite according to
your own rules to range yourselves on the side
of the Impossible, pretending that this, and this
alone, shall be the law of your life?—is there
no want of inward candour, which may be of
more spiritual importance than mere verbal
accuracy, in this pretended assumption of a virtue
unattainable, and untenable if attained?—this
passionate declaring yourselves to be votaries of
one God when you are bringing garlands and
offerings to the shrine of another? That tiptoe
attitude of strained moral assumption is a greater
loss of truth, to my mind, than bidding your
servant say Not at Home when you are all the
while in the drawing-room, comfortably or
uncomfortably engaged in your own business, and
indisposed to admit the outside world for twenty-
four hours to come. But then I may be singular
in my measurement of respective values; I think
I am right.

"How do you do, Mrs. Jones? I am glad
to see you." Now here is a white lie at the
very beginning of things; and yet what else can
I say, and what harm have I done? and yet
again, lie as it is I contend that it is absolutely
necessary, and even an act of virtue into the
bargain. I certainly am not glad to see Mrs.
Jones. I have no dislike to her, and perhaps I
rather like her than not, and it may be that I
distinctly respect her and think highly of her
moral qualities; but glad to see her! when she
has come just at the most awkward time she
could have chosen—only cold mutton for dinner
and not enough of that, Emma gone a visiting,
and only that dirty slatternly Jane left to wait
and do all the work, baby fractious with his
teeth and will not go to the new nurse, and I
with a headache that almost distracts me. And
Mrs. Jones has a shrill metallic voice, not
unlike the rasping of a file or the setting of a saw.
But can I, ought I, to tell her that she is a
nuisance, and that I am anything but glad to see
her? In strict truth, I am telling a lie if a
white one, when I welcome her and bid her be
seated and take off her bonnet; but it seems to
me the only thing left me to do, and I can see
no outlet anywhere else. If she says—shrieking
out her words more like a poll-parrot than a
human being—" Am I in your way, my dear?"
truth would bid me answer, "Abominably so;"
but good breeding and Christian charity—and
let me tell you, Christian charity is the best
breeding we have—crisp my lips into the proper
smile, and toll from off my tongue like beads
upon a string, the conventional words, " Not at
all, dear Mrs. Jones. I am very glad to see you,
if you can put up with things a little uncomfortable
and out of order." If I were to say " Yes,
you are in my way, and I shall be obliged to you
if you will go," I think I should be doing a great
wrong. Mrs. Jones has come very many miles
to see me; she lives at Watford and I live at
Bayswater; she has had nothing to eat since her
eight o'clock breakfast and it is now one; but
if I were to tell her, though never so mildly,
that she was a nuisance, and an incumbrance,
and decidedly on my back as the French say,
she would taice huff as surely as straw catches
fire, and about as quickly, and be off again at a
moment's notice, unrested, unrefreshed, and my
enemy for life. I look upon my white lie as
simple self-sacrifice and discipline, and I should
regard the truth as a bit of rather coarse and
uncharitable selfishness. The Truthites would
have me merely passive—as if that were possible!
—as if the declining to say yes is not generally
as eloquent as the most unmistakable no, or