The boys, indeed, were hard to coerce; they "bolted" still when the door-bell rang; but domestic authority, which is apt to be magnified on "the girls," overruled Eleanor and me for our good, and her mother--who reasoned with us far more than she commanded--convinced us of how much selfishness there was in this, as in all acts of discourtesy.
But what do we not owe to her good counsels?
In how many evening talks has she not warned us of the follies, affectations, or troubles to which our lives might specially be liable! Against despising interests that are not our own, or graces which we have chosen to neglect, against the danger of satire, against the love or the fear of being thought singular, and, above all, against the petty pride of clique.
"I do not know which is the worst," I remember her saying, "a religious clique, an intellectual clique, a fashionable clique, a moneyed clique, or a family clique.

And I have seen them all." "Come, Mother," said Eleanor, "you cannot persuade us you would not have more sympathy with the intellectual than the moneyed clique, for instance ?" "I should have warmly declared so myself, at one time," said Mrs.
Arkwright, "but I have a vivid remembrance of a man belonging to an artistic clique, to whose house I once went with some friends.

My friends were artists also, but their minds were enlarged, instead of being narrowed, by one chief pursuit.

Their special art gave them sympathy with all others, as the high cultivation of one virtue is said to bring all the rest in its train.

But this man talked the shibboleth of his craft over one's head to other members of his clique with a defiance of good manners arising more from conceit than from ignorance of the ways of society; and with a transparent intention of being overheard and admired which reminded me of the little self-conscious conceits of children before visitors.