"I am not inculcating deceitfulness—I am preaching wisdom. When I was young I used to treat men as I treated women, and tell them the whole truth about everything. But it didn't answer; they couldn't stand it."
"So now you tell them stories, I presume?"
"No; I still give them the truth, but I offer it to them in a peptonized form, so that they can digest it without discomfort."
"But what are the pretty, stupid women to do when the men try to educate them?" asked Violet, who was generally conversationally left a long way behind the rest of the field.
Her aunt gently instructed her. "Their course is even simpler than that of the clever ones. They have merely to listen to their husband's opinions, and repeat them verbatim as their own. A man always thinks a woman clever whose thoughts are identical with his—but when her expression of them is also identical, he considers her absolutely brilliant."
Mr. Kesterton laughed heartily. "You have learnt a great many things, my dear lady."
"I have lived a long time and I have kept my eyes open. Nevertheless there are two things which I have never been able to find out; namely, why people fall in love, and why Punch is published on a Wednesday."
"Then Paul is even cleverer than you are, Aunt Caroline," interpolated Paul's admiring wife, "because there is nothing that he doesn't know."
"Oh! yes there is," said Paul modestly; "I never know what to talk to young girls about, or what seven times eight are."
"I am with you there, Seaton," remarked the host; "the only things in which I take no interest are young girls and bimetallism."