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.”

“Good—­the reform is beginning; there is hope for you yet; you will not tell a lie to save your dearest friend’s soul, but you will spew out one without a scruple to save yourself the discomfort of telling an unpleasant truth.”

He rose.  Hester, speaking for both, said; coldly: 

“We have lied; we perceive it; it will occur no more.  To lie is a sin.  We shall never tell another one of any kind whatsoever, even lies of courtesy or benevolence, to save any one a pang or a sorrow decreed for him by God.”