The worst of keeping a "Family Skeleton" shut up in a cupboard is that the horrid thing _will insist_ on rattling its old bones at the most inopportune moments--just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea the nearest local thing you've got to God--whether she be an "Honourable" (in her own right, mark you!) or merely the vicar's wife! Whatever family skeletons do or do not possess, they most assuredly lack _tact_. They are worse than relations for giving your "show away" at the wrong moment. If relations do nothing else, they at any rate sit tightly together around family skeletons, if only to hide them from full view by the crowd. But, of course, the crowd always sees them. The crowd always sees _everything_ you don't want it to see, and is quite blind to the triumphal banners you are waving at it out of your top-room window. Sometimes I think that the better plan in regard to family skeletons is to expose them to public view without any dissembling whatsoever, crying to the world at large, and to the "woman who lives opposite" in particular, "There! that's _our_ family disgrace! Everybody's got one. What's _yours_?" I believe that this method would shut most people up quite satisfactorily. People only try to learn what they believe you do not want them to know. If you push the truth before them, they turn away their heads. To pretend is usually useless. Not very many of us get through life without experiencing a desire to hide something which everybody has already seen. Wiser far be honest, even if it costs you a disagreeable quarter of an hour. Better one disagreeable quarter of an hour than months and years sitting on a bombshell which any passer-by can explode. Honesty is always one of the very few invulnerable things. No pin-pricks can pierce it--and pin-pricks are usually the bane of life. It's like laughter, in that nobody has yet been found to parry its blows successfully. Shame is a sure sign of possible defeat--and the world always ranges itself every time on the side of the probable victor. If you once show people that you _can't_ be hurt in the way they are trying to hurt you, they soon leave off trying, and begin to think of your Christian virtues in general and their own more numerous ones in particular. It's only when your courage is sheer camouflage that the world tries to penetrate the disguise. Not until a woman dips her hair in henna and, metaphorically speaking, cries, "See how young I look now!" that other women begin to remark, "You know, dear, she is _not so youthful as she was_!" It's only when the rumour goes round that a man has had a financial misfortune that everybody to whom he owes anything fling in their bills. And thus it is with family skeletons. If, as it were, you ask them to live with you downstairs, everybody ignores them and finds them "frightfully dull." But the moment you relegate them into the topmost attic--lo and behold, every single one of your acquaintances expresses a desire to rush upstairs, ostensibly to look at the view.