While every one, I suppose, agrees that Lady Ida Sitwell richly deserves her three months’ imprisonment, there are many who will have a sneaking pity for her.  And that not because she is a woman of family who will suffer peculiar tortures from prison life.  On the contrary, I have no doubt that a spell of imprisonment is just what she needs.  In fact, it is what most of us need, especially most of those who live a life of luxurious idleness.  To be compelled to get up early, to clean your cell, to wear plain clothes, to live on plain food, to observe regular hours, and do regular duties—­this is no matter for tears, but for thankfulness.  It is the sort of discipline that we ought to undergo periodically for our spiritual and even bodily health.

No, the sympathy that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is commonly felt for the spendthrift—­for the person who, no matter what his income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet.  The miser has no friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many.  We avoid Harpagon as though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could “find no cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse,” never lacked friends, and even Justice Shallow, it will be remembered, lent him a thousand crowns.  There is no record of its having been repaid, though Falstaff was once surprised, in a moment of bitter humiliation, into admitting the debt.  And Charles Surface and Micawber—­who can deny them a certain affection?  I have no doubt that Mrs. Micawber’s papa, who “lived to bail Mr. Micawber out many times until he died lamented by a wide circle of friends,” loved the fellow as you and I love him.  I should deem it a privilege to bail out Micawber.  But Elwes, the miser—­ugh! the very name chills the blood.

The difference, I suppose, proceeds from the idea that while the miser is the soul of selfishness, the spendthrift is at bottom a good-natured fellow and a lover of his kind.  No doubt the vice of the spendthrift has a touch of generosity, but it is often generosity at other people’s expense, and is not seldom as essentially selfish as the vice of the miser.  It is rather like the generosity of the man who, according to Sydney Smith, was so touched by a charity sermon that he picked his neighbour’s pocket of a guinea and put it in the plate.  I have no doubt that Lady Ida if she had got Miss Dobbs’s money would have scattered it about with a very free hand, and would have contributed to the collection plate quite handsomely.  But she was selfish none the less.  It was her form of selfishness to enjoy the luxury of spending money she hadn’t got, just as it was Elwes’s form of selfishness to enjoy the luxury of saving money that he had got.