And so they sat looking at one another; he a silly slave to her wiles, and crushing back the honest longing he had had for her approbation of his best virtue; and she, a slave to the conditions imposed on disfranchised womanhood, and crushing back her longing for his recognition of her individuality and her right to be of sound use to the world,—practical, sound use. She could not accuse him of deflection from that virtue which woman is taught to most strenuously hold herself, and man’s breach of which most cruelly afflicts her. So she accused him of lying,—a slave’s vice,—which he, not being a slave, need not lean toward. Thus they played at cross-purposes, neither helping the other out of the social tangle. When he rose from the table it was with an angry perplexity. “What in the mischief has set her to believe that I am such a liar?” he said to himself. And as she went up toward her pretty private parlor she was thinking to herself: “He is as truthful a fellow, as far as his words and promises go, as I happen to know. But his fickle passions are what I despise him for. He really thinks I doubt that he has the rosebud and the poem on his table. I as good as saw them when he said it. But that means another love; and that is what he was gazing at, with his knife and fork in the air like a farmer. I’ve got the idea now. They were farmer’s people when he was twelve or so. He of course had that habit then, and he was thinking of his early boyhood and fell back into those rough ways. This new love, this rosebud flame, has something to do with old times. She can’t be a very young girl, then.” And so soliloquizing, each within self, they walked up the broad stairway together. “Your rosebud took you to boyhood, didn’t it?” she asked, turning square upon him at the landing, and facing him as he stood on the step below. “It is no use saying yes or no; you don’t believe me,” said he, with a blunt boy-directness that seemed to touch her. “You great goose!” she said. “Of course I believe you.” “You said you didn’t.” “Well, what of that?” “A good deal of it,” said he, indignantly. “I believe you when you tell me a thing.” “More goose you!” He stood and looked at her like one dazed. He was trying so hard that day to bring his life to firmer foundations; and she stood there laughing at him as though lies and truths were all jokes together. “Good heavens, what do you mean! Do you mean that you lie?” “Yes, that’s what I mean; always do,” said she. “Then you are lying now?” “Of course.” “Oh, then, if you are lying when you say that you lie, you would be telling the truth then; only if you are telling the truth when you say you lie, then you are lying.” “You need to go to sleep and clear your head,” said she coolly. “Look here now, tell me once, are you truthful?” “Yes, I am full of truths of one kind and another: oppressively full. I should like to unload.” “And yet you say you are a liar?”