The little stratagem begins to look more serious when the child gets artful enough to put the mother off the scent by a false statement. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother ‘monkey,’ and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: “I said I was a monkey”. In some cases the child does not wait to be questioned. A little girl mentioned by Compayré, being put out by something the mother had done or said, cried: ‘Nasty!’ (Vilaine!) then after a significant silence, corrected herself in this wise, ‘Dolly nasty’ (Poupée vilaine). The skill with which this transference was effected without any violence to grammar argues a precocious art.[184] ----- Footnote 184: Perez gives a similar story, only that the epithet ‘vilaine’ was here transferred to ‘l’eau’. _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 53. ----- Our moral discipline may develop untruth in another way. When the punishment has been inflicted and the governor, relenting from the brutal harshness, asks: ‘Are you sorry?’ or ‘Aren’t you sorry?’ the answer is exceedingly likely to be ‘No,’ even though this is in a sense untrue. More clearly is this lying of obstinacy seen where a child is shut up and kept without food. Asked: ‘Are you hungry?’ the hardy little sinner stifles his sensations and pluckily answers ‘No,’ even though the low and dismal character of the sound shows that the untruth is but a half-hearted affair. I have tried to show how a child’s untruths may be more than half “playing,” how when they are serious assertions they may involve a measure of self-deception, and how even when consciously false they may have their origin in excusable circumstances and feelings. In urging all this I do not wish to deny the statement that children wall sometimes deliberately invent a lie from a base motive, as when a girl of three seeing her little brother caressed by her mother for some minutes and feeling herself neglected fabricated the story that ‘Henri’ had been cruel to the parrot.[185] Yet I am disposed to look on such mean falsehoods as exceptional if not abnormal. ----- Footnote 185: Perez, _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 54. -----