tors who were bred in the cold and windy times of the Reformation it was held to deal chiefly with duelling, gaming, and illicit affairs. "The debt of honor," "the affair of honor"-what do even these corrupted phrases mean except that the gentleman has found more ways to bind himself than the laws of the land afford? I do not know that Honor ever compelled a man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel; but if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled-if he has undertaken to play the lamentable game -he must not skulk behind a policeman, like a cry-baby or a sans-culotte, because things have not gone his way. If he has broken, he must

pay.

Part of the code of honor begins only when the Christian precept has been broken. Is it so bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told what to do after you have once done something wrong? The Catechism, as a practical guide, is wofully incomplete without the code of the gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, the Puritan told you to repent; and he was quite right. But there is work left for the sinner after the repenting has been done. Both Honor and the Catechism will do their best to keep you out of a mess. mess. The difference comes later: for after you have got into a mess, the Catechism leaves you to God, while Honor shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow beings, to repair that ill and not extend it.

Honor is a matter of practical politics

frightfully unpractical politics, in another sense, they often are. A cynical young woman once Isaid to me that she found cads more interesting than gentlemen, because you could always tell what a gentleman would do in a given situation, whereas you could never tell, in any situation, what a cad would do. Cads may or may not be the proper sport of cynical young women; but to the average busy creature the gentleman is wholly delightful in that he is wholly predicable. The Christian is not predicable, for the simple reason that he has been given a counsel of perfection. You know that any given Christian will, by the day of his majority, have done some, at least, of the things which the Catechism has expressly warned him not to do. "The way that can be walked upon is not the perfect way," said Laotse long ago. The Church does not believe that you have always done everything that your sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you would do. The confessional is itself the greatest confession that the Church has ever made. One of the most convenient things about Honor is that its explicit code is limited; and you can say of some men when they die that they have never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen. Honor is of the world, worldly-and some people have distorted that magnificent fact into an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has done in "Tomlinson."

All this about Honor is not so much a digres

sion as an approach. For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of self-defence, the lie "of obligation" cannot be juggled away; and it is the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend's secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil, while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as consecrated and de rigueur. But the gentleman, I venture to say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.

It is easier as some sociologists do-to plot the curves of a desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be

home-keepers indeed — perpetually cradled who need never lie. Literal truth is imprisoned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, affecting to be the ruler of the world. Even the faithful know that the claim is vain. The lies of obligation and convention are not, in the deepest sense, unveracious; for they are not preeminently intended to deceive. We expect them of other civilized beings and expect other civilized beings to expect them of us. Speaking such falsehoods, and such falsehoods only, we are still on truth's own ground. The lie told for the liar's own sake marks the moment when a man has passed from beneath her standard, across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is already hot-foot into the jungle.

I

MISS ALCOTT'S NEW ENGLAND

REMEMBER being very much impressed -and not a little shocked-when a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott's stories. It had never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. Little Women was as universal as Hamlet. I remembered perfectly that French playmates of mine in Paris had loved Les Quatre Filles du Docteur March (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated). If children of a Latin-moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic tradition could find no flaw in Miss Alcott's presentment of young life, I could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it sympathetic.

I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott's special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend said was simply