“Hush! You are as ignorant as cats, both of you, and you don't know what you are talking about. You are like all the rest of the moral moles; you lie from morning till night, but because you don't do it with your mouths, but only with your lying eyes, your lying inflections, your deceptively misplaced emphasis, and your misleading gestures, you turn up your complacent noses and parade before God and the world as saintly and unsmirched Truth-Speakers, in whose cold-storage souls a lie would freeze to death if it got there! Why will you humbug yourselves with that foolish notion that no lie is a lie except a spoken one? What is the difference between lying with your eyes and lying with your mouth? There is none; and if you would reflect a moment you would see that it is so. There isn't a human being that doesn't tell a gross of lies every day of his life; and you--why, between you, you tell thirty thousand; yet you flare up here in a lurid hypocritical horror because I tell that child a benevolent and sinless lie to protect her from her imagination, which would get to work and warm up her blood to a fever in an hour, if I were disloyal enough to my duty to let it. Which I should probably do if I were interested in saving my soul by such disreputable means. “Come, let us reason together. Let us examine details. When you two were in the sick-room raising that riot, what would you have done if you had known I was coming?” “Well, what?” “You would have slipped out and carried Helen with you--wouldn't you?” The ladies were silent. “What would be your object and intention?” “Well, what?” “To keep me from finding out your guilt; to beguile me to infer that Margaret's excitement proceeded from some cause not known to you. In a word, to tell me a lie--a silent lie. Moreover, a possibly harmful one.” The twins colored, but did not speak. “You not only tell myriads of silent lies, but you tell lies with your mouths--you two.” “_That _is not so!” “It is so. But only harmless ones. You never dream of uttering a harmful one. Do you know that that is a concession--and a confession?” “How do you mean?” “It is an unconscious concession that harmless lies are not criminal; it is a confession that you constantly _make _that discrimination. For instance, you declined old Mrs. Foster's invitation last week to meet those odious Higbies at supper--in a polite note in which you expressed regret and said you were very sorry you could not go. It was a lie. It was as unmitigated a lie as was ever uttered. Deny it, Hester--with another lie.” Hester replied with a toss of her head. “That will not do. Answer. Was it a lie, or wasn't it?” The color stole into the cheeks of both women, and with a struggle and an effort they got out their confession: “It was a lie.”