The office of the gossip is so thankless that it is a marvel any one accepts it.  To certain natures there is positive delight in being the first to relate a choice bit of scandal.  It never occurs to them that the old maxim with regard to a dog who fetches a bone can possibly be applied to them.  But it is as true as the stars that if a person brings you an unsavory tale of a friend, she will carry away as ugly a story of you, if she can find the faintest suggestion upon which to found it.  The gossip acquires a detective-like faculty for following out a clue, but unfortunately, the clue is oftener purely imaginary than real.  A little discrepancy like this does not disturb the professional scandal-monger.  So tenacious is the habit of making much of nothing, that, deprived of this, her sustenance, she would find life colorless and void.  So, if material does not present itself, she manufactures it.  One must live.

There is also a habit, which, while comparatively innocent, is likely to bring trouble upon the perpetrator.  It is that of making many confidantes.  Here comes a very serious cui bono.  Undoubtedly there is a momentary satisfaction in telling one’s woes and sorrows to an interested listener.  When the auditor is a friend, and a trusted friend, whose sympathy is genuine and whose discretion is vast, there is a comfort beyond description in unburdening one’s soul.  But there is a line to be drawn even here.  It is not deceit to keep your private affairs to yourself when you are sure that you are guilty of nothing dishonorable or hypocritical in so doing.  You are often your own best and safest counselor.  I know one woman who long ago said a thing which should be a motto to those susceptible persons who in a sudden expansion of the heart tell all they know and which they would most wish to keep to themselves.

“My dear,” she said, “in the course of a somewhat checkered life I have discovered that while I have often been sorry for things which I have told, I have never had cause to regret what I have kept to myself.”

If you have a secret and wish to keep it, guard it jealously.  It ceases to be yours alone when you impart it to another.  Your confidante may be discretion personified, and, yet again, she may have some nearer and dearer one to whom she “tells everything,” even the secrets of her friends.  Or, you may in time learn to be ashamed of the confidence which you have reposed in this person, and the knowledge that she knows and remembers the thing, and, it may be, knows that you feel a mortification at the thought of it, will gall you unspeakably.

Perhaps the hardest struggle that comes to the average human being is to let others be mistaken.  Yet what good will it do to point out to them their mistakes?  If your husband or son tells several people that he met John Smith last week in New York, and you know that he was in that city three weeks ago, why correct him?  He is talking hastily and does not stop to measure his words or time.  The mistake is unimportant.  Why antagonize a man by exclaiming: