"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 to be a biped of the same species.
There was an hotel in Rainharbour called the "United Kingdom," where Jim spent much of his time playing billiards, drinking beer, and smoking pipes. He had to coax money out of his mother continually for these pursuits.
"It's the kind of thing a fellow must do, you know, mamma," he said. "You can't expect him to stick at home like a girl. He must see life, or he'll be a muff instead of a man of the world. How shall I get on at Fairholm, when I come in for the property, if I'm not up to things?"
This was said at breakfast one morning, and Mrs. Caldwell, sitting opposite the window, raised her worn face and looked up at the sky, considering what else there was that she could do without.
"Do you learn how to manage estates at the 'United Kingdom'?" Beth put in innocently.