I remember, too, hearing Mother talking with some women about how young a certain neighbour was when her daughter was born. In telling the school girls about it later, I announced that Mrs. H---- was only five years older than her daughter Ida. Shouts of derision greeted my statement, but I was firm. One big girl called me “little fool,” and I suffered I know not what ridicule. It was partly an exaggeration, partly ignorance. Grasping the main fact, that the mother was very young when her child was born, and having forgotten how young, but wanting to make my story worth while, I had resorted to a positive statement which I stoutly maintained. I could not see why those girls should doubt my word, even if the statement was startling. _Of course_ it was unusual--that was why I had cited it. I have a fellow feeling for the Vassar student who, when asked by the resident woman physician what her paternal grandfather died of, and not knowing, but wishing not to seem ignorant, said, “I--I think he died in infancy.” For years I was not a little given to reporting bright things people might have said, as though they had said them. It was such fun to embellish commonplace events and comments with additions of my own. Whenever I would tell these untruths I always had a queer feeling (almost of disappointment) to find that nothing happened to me; that no one questioned them; and that everything went on just as before the lie had slipped off my tongue. I don’t know whether I expected Ananias’s and Sapphira’s fate, or what, but I expected something, and nothing happened! This tendency to exaggeration and misstatement, and, on occasion, to deliberate falsehood, I have tried conscientiously to overcome. In fact, for years I swung far to the other side. Now, in matters of fact, I think I am more often scrupulously accurate than not. If I cannot be accurate, I refrain from giving a definite statement. My special training in later years of course helped in this respect. But it was earlier, when I became a “Christian,” that this tendency appeared to me in all its heinousness, and in striving to overcome it I became, for a time, almost morbidly conscientious. One day in school the word “conscientious” came up for discussion. I was not present, but learned from one of the girls that “Prof” had spoken out in school freely, using my name as an example of what conscientiousness meant. But my wise little sister (and how I loved her for it!), though pleased at the reference to me, went to all the girls she thought likely to mention it to me, and cautioned them not to. When I learned of it, from one who never could keep a secret, I asked why Sister didn’t want her to tell me. “Oh, she said it would make you proud, or something like that.” And she was right. I was too self-conscious as it was, and vain, in a demure kind of way. Kate knew my weaknesses.