Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/155

 Sometimes the boy with good manners and rather uncertain morals seems to manage as well as if his principles of conduct were quite above reproach. One of the best-mannered boys I have ever known was of this sort. He was good-tempered, polite, thoughtful of others, clever, a veritable Steerforth, in fact. He never seemed either to say or do the tactless thing, and he was loved by many people and thought charming by more. But one did not know him long until it became evident that he was selfish. He never did a kindness that involved a personal sacrifice. He never gave up or resisted anything that furnished him personal or physical pleasure. The result was inevitable. He made friends only to use them for his own ends; he was honest only when honesty subserved his purpose. He wasted his money, he learned to gamble, to drink, to engage in the most unclean practices simply because he had no real moral principles. He is charming still at forty, but no one trusts him; he picks up a precarious livelihook by the most irregular business methods. He might have been anything he chose if he had been honest and clean.

Sometimes the boy with good morals and without the finesse of good manners grows a trifle discouraged.

"It doesn't pay," he affirms. "It is the smooth guy who gets by."

He finds himself unpopular, ignored, made fun of, and he attributes the result to his rigid principles rather than to his lack of tact, or to his crude manners. A boy with