The word “parables,” somehow, too, this evening, struck him worse than it would if she had said “lies”; for “parables,” as they were taught him at his mother’s knee, were “beautiful words of life”; and besides, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” was getting to be a fact which he was illustrating in himself.
While he thought of these things he looked so glowering that Mrs. Mancredo said, lightly, “Now what ails you?”
“How many times in a week, on the average, do you suppose you tell us fellows that we lie?”
“Well, the times I tell you so, compared with the times you do it, are so infinitesimally small that a body could not be to the trouble of reckoning them,” said she lazily.
He looked at her seriously. “Do you think men lie?” he said.
She answered him in blank amazement: “Why, of course, child!”
“All men?”
“Might except a deaf mute or two, if you like.”
“Will you except me?”
“Did you say except or accept?”