eBooks Base 2000

"
"But why gibbet them? Aren't they nice, don't you care for them?"
"Prodigiously, of course. Yet would you find it in the least interesting
or illuminating if I indexed their modest virtues only?"
"I think the old soldier found it both interesting and illuminating when
you indexed my father's virtues just now."
"Sir Charles's virtues hardly come under the head of modest ones," Mrs.
Frayling threw off almost sharply. "Give me someone as well worth
acclaiming and I'll shout with the best! But you scarcely quote your
father as among the average, do you?--The people whom you'll meet on
Thursday compared to him, I'm afraid, are as molehills to the mountains
yonder. If I described them by their amiable qualities alone they'd be as
indistinguishable and as insipid as a row of dolls. Only through their
aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop
definiteness of outline and begin to live. Oh! nothing could be unkinder
than to whitewash them. Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye
on the Church, the other on the world.


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