I remember vividly the first time that the infant was fed:  all of us gathered round, with matter-of-course professional air, as if these elaborate hygienic ceremonies were the universal custom when newly-born infants first taste their mothers’ milk.  Standing in the background, I saw Sylvia start with dismay, as she noted how pale and thin the poor little one had become.  It was hunger that caused the whimpering, so the nurse declared, busying herself in the meantime to keep the tiny hands from the mother’s face.  The latter sank back and closed her eyes—­nothing, it seemed, could prevail over the ecstasy of that first marvellous sensation, but afterwards she asked that I might stay with her, and as soon as the others were gone, she unmasked the batteries of her suspicion upon me.  “Mary!  What in the world has happened to my baby?”

So began a new stage in the campaign of lying.  “It’s nothing, nothing.  Just some infection.  It happens frequently.”

“But what is the cause of it?”

“We can’t tell.  It may be a dozen things.  There are so many possible sources of infection about a birth.  It’s not a very sanitary thing, you know.”

“Mary!  Look me in the face!”

“Yes, dear?”

“You’re not deceiving me?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—­it’s not really something serious?  All these doctors—­this mystery—­this vagueness!”

“It was your husband, my dear Sylvia, who sent the doctors—­it was his stupid man’s way of being attentive.” (This at Aunt Varina’s suggestion—­the very subtle lady!).

“Mary, I’m worried.  My baby looks so badly, and I feel something is wrong.”

“My dear Sylvia,” I chided, “if you worry about it you will simply be harming the child.  Your milk may go wrong.”

“Oh, that’s just it!  That’s why you would not tell me the truth!”

We persuade ourselves that there are certain circumstances under which lying is necessary, but always when we come to the lies we find them an insult to the soul.  Each day I perceived that I was getting in deeper—­and each day I watched Aunt Varina and the doctor busied to push me deeper yet.

There had come a telegram from Douglas van Tuiver to Dr. Perrin, revealing the matter which stood first in that gentleman’s mind.  “I expect no failure in your supply of the necessary tact.”  By this vagueness we perceived that he too was trusting no secrets to telegraph operators.  Yet for us it was explicit and illuminative.  It recalled the tone of quiet authority I had noted in his dealings with his chauffeur, and it sent me off by myself for a while to shake my fist at all husbands.

19.  Mrs. Tuis, of course, had no need of any warning from the head of the house.  The voice of her ancestors guided her in all such emergencies.  The dear lady had got to know me quite well, at the more or less continuous dramatic rehearsals we conducted; and now and then her trembling hands would seek to fasten me in the chains of decency.  “Mrs. Abbott, think what a scandal there would be if Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver were to break with her husband!”