"I don't think I agree with you," she said, giving a shove to her soft elastic hair which did not improve the indefiniteness of the parting. "Of course it's unsatisfactory in one way to feel one will never live to finish things, but in another way I think it's a great comfort to feel one can never use them up or outlive them if one lasts on to be a hundred. And though one gets very cross and miserable with failing so over things one works at, I don't know whether one would be so much happier when one was at the top of the tree. I'm not sure that the chief pleasure isn't actually in the working at things--I mean in the drudgery of learning, rather than in the triumph of having learnt." "There's something in that," said Clement. And it was a great deal for Clement to say. It does not take much to convert _me_ to Eleanor's views of anything. But I do think experience bears out what she said about this matter. Perhaps that accounts for my having a happy remembrance of old times when we worked at things together, even if we failed and cried over them. I know that practically, now, I would willingly join the others in going at anything, though I could not promise not to be peevish over my own stupidity sometimes, and if I was very much tired. I don't think there was anything untrue in my calling the times we went sketching together happy times--in spite of what Clement says. But he does rule such very straight lines all over life, and I sometimes think one may rule them too straight--even for full truth. CHAPTER XXVI. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS--CLIQUE--THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE--OUT VISITING--HOUSE-PRIDE--DRESSMAKING. Eleanor and I were not always at home. We generally went visiting somewhere, at least once a year. I think it was good for us. Great as were the advantages of the life I now shared over an existence wasted in a petty round of ignoble gossip and social struggle, it had the drawback of being almost too self-sufficing, perhaps--I am not certain--a little too laborious. I do think, but for me, it must, at any rate, have become the latter. I am so much less industrious, energetic, clever and good in every way than Eleanor, for one thing, that my very idleness holds us back; and I think a taste for gaiety (I simply mean being gay, not balls and parties), and for social pleasure, and for pretty things, and graceful "situations" runs in my veins with my French blood, and helps to break the current of our labours.