“Yes.”
“Yet, on your return, you gave me a rather tedious account of your mother’s and Christine’s thankfulness 265 for the money. It created in me a wrong impression of your mother and sister. I asked myself why they should be so crawlingly thankful to you for paying a just debt, and I thought meanly of them. Why did you not pay them the ninety pounds you borrowed from them? And why did you invent that servile bit of thankfulness?”
“I will tell you, Roberta. When I got home I found the whole village on my father’s place. The funeral arrangements were, for a man in my father’s position, exceedingly extravagant, and I was astonished at my mother’s recklessness, and want of oversight. Christine was overcome with grief, and everything appeared to be left to men and women who were spending other people’s money. I thought under the circumstances it was better not to pay Christine at that time, and I think I was right.”
“So far, perhaps, you were prudent, but prudence is naturally mean and as often wrong as right. And why did you lie to me, so meanly and so tediously?”
“You have to lie to women, if you alter in the least anything you have told them. You cannot explain to a woman, unless you want to stand all day doing it. There are times when a lie is simply an explanation, a better one than the truth would be. The great Shakespeare held that such lies were more for number, than account.”
“I do not take my opinion of lies from William Shakespeare. A lie is a lie. There was no need for a lie in this case. The lie you made up about it was 266 for account, not for number—be sure of that. You admit that you did not give Christine the ninety pounds you borrowed from me, in order to pay your debt to her. What did you do with the money?”
“Have you any right to ask me that question? If I borrowed ninety pounds from the bank, would they ask me what I did with it?”
“I neither know nor care what the bank would do. I am seeking information for Roberta Ruleson, and I shall take my own way to obtain it.”
“What is it you want to know?”
“What you did with that ninety pounds?”