“I wish I had stayed and put it across,” he answered. “If you and the kids would only learn not to blab everything you know. 252 It’s the only way to work anything. Minute you tell a thing, it’s all off.”
There was still a great deal of development work to be put on Ptolemy’s moral standard.
“You’ll find, my lad,” remonstrated Rob, “that honesty is the best policy.”
“I’d have been perfectly honest about it,” he defended. “I would have told him the truth, and how our parents had deserted us, and how mudder took us in when we were homeless and was bringing us up like her own because she hadn’t got any, and how stepdaddy wanted to turn us out, and she wouldn’t let him, and then he would have decided against stepdaddy and given mudder the money so she could keep us.”
“Ptolemy,” I said warningly, “there is a way of telling the truth, or rather of coloring white lies with enough truth to make them deceive, that is more dishonorable than an out and out lie.”
“Tell me, Ptolemy,” asked Silvia, “how did you know about that offer of five thousand dollars for each child?”
“I overheard it,” he said guardedly; “but I can’t remember where.”
“He heard me say so,” confessed Huldah.
“It was when he first come here and he was making us so much trouble, and I told him it was too bad we had to have other folks’ brats around when, if we only had our own, they’d be bringing in something.”