OUR PET VIRTUES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 508, 12 October 1912, Page 7

OUR PET VIRTUES.

I often think that the virtue people talk about moat, and claim as their very own is exactly the one they are most deficient in, When Uriah Heep talks about being " 'unable," you may be pretty sure he has his eye on a partnership in the firm. I know a woman whose whole life is a pose, who never seems to know a natural moment, or to speak a natural word sight out from the unregenerate heart of her; and yet her pet virtue is truth. What volumes of verbal contempt she pours out on any direct lie even of the most innocent kind; what appalling lectures on the wickedness of any deviation from the set line of accuracy in describing an incident. If any of her unlucky men folk attempt, as men folk will, to introduce a little humour into a narrative by means of judicious embroideries, she is down uopn them, a picture of outraged virtue, contradicting them in all the points that make for humour, and laying bare their enormities to the amused auditors. And yet there is no truth in her. An open direct lie she would probably be afraid to tell, but subtle deceitful suggestions are for ever on her lips, and she thinks nothing of insinuating the most dreadful things about persons with whom she has quarrelled. Then how often we hear the lazy man descanting on the grandeur and nobility of work, in capital letters. He leans back in his padded arm chair, stretches out his feet in their comfortable slippers, and tells us how the world has been built up by workers—how the hewers of wood and drawers of water are the saviours of their race. And then he lights up his pipe and goes on to say that it is only by self-abnegating work, and strenuous unremitting effort that we can ever accomplish anything wroth accomplishing in this world. And perhaps he is right; and then he goes to sleep after dinner and dreams, prechance, of great things done. It is the lax mother, perhapß you have observed, who talk 3 most about the value of parental control. I knew one who had a thousand ideas on the subject of control, and not one practical device for gaining it. While she gave free and voluble advice to all around, her own children grew up like weeds, and were a pest to the neighbourhood. It is just as well now and then for all of us to leave off talking of our pet virtues, and try to cultivate them instead.