. . . Look you! keep a little watch on Helen;
she is sick, and is going to be sicker."
The ladies looked a little surprised, and not credulous; and Hester said:
"How is that? It isn't an hour since you said she was as sound
as a nut."
The doctor answered, tranquilly:
"It was a lie."
The ladies turned upon him indignantly, and Hannah said:
"How can you make an odious confession like that, in so indifferent
a tone, when you know how we feel about all forms of--"
"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.
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