What sort of dogs are they?  Well, to-day they are things like this—­an angry letter from an old friend to whom something which I said about him was repeated by a busybody.  The thing was true enough, and it was not wrong for me to say it; but that it should be repeated with a deft and offensive twist to the man himself is the mischief.  I cannot deny that I said it, and I can only affirm its truth.  Was it friendly to say it? says my correspondent.  Well, I don’t think it was unfriendly as I said it.  It is the turn given to it that makes it seem injurious; and yet I cannot deny that what has been repeated is substantially what I said.  Why did I not say it to him? he asks, instead of saying it to an acquaintance.  It might, he goes on, have been conceivably of some use if I had said it to him, but it can be of no use for me to have said it to a third person.  I have no reply to this; it is perfectly true.  But I do not go in for pointing out my friends’ faults to them, unless they ask me to do so:  and the remark in question was just one of those hasty, unconsidered, sweeping little judgments that one does pass in conversation about the action of a friend.  One cannot—­at least I cannot—­so order my conversation that if a casual criticism is repeated without qualification to the person who is the subject of it, he may not be pained by it.  The repetition of it in all its nakedness makes it seem deliberate, when it is not deliberate at all.  I say in my reply frankly that I admire, esteem, and love my friend, but that I do not therefore admire his faults.  I add that I do not myself mind my friends criticising me, so long as they do not do it to my face.  But I am aware that, for all my frankness, I cut a poor figure in the matter.  I foresee a tiresome, useless correspondence, and a certain inevitable coldness.  Then, too, I must write a disagreeable letter to the man who has repeated my criticism; and he will reply, quite fairly, that I ought not to have said it if I did not mean it, and if I was not prepared to stand by it.  And he will be annoyed too, because he will not see that he has done anything that he ought not to have done.  I shall say that I shall have for the future to be careful what I say to him, and he will reply that he quite approves of my decision, and that it is a pity I have not always acted on the same principle; and he will have a detestable species of justice on his side.

Then there are other things as well.  There is some troublesome legal business, arising out of a quarrel between two relations of mine on a question of some property.  Whatever I decide, someone will be vexed.  I do not want to take any part in the matter at all, and the only reason I do it is because I have been appealed to, and there does not seem to be anyone else who will do it.  This will entail a quantity of correspondence and some visits to town, because of the passion that people have for interviews, and because lawyers love delay, since it is a profitable