"How did you know? How the devil——" He stared at me as though his eyes were struggling with an unaccustomed light—"Well, she has, if you want to know, and that's remarkable enough, but that's not the only thing—She—she——"
He paused, then flung it at me with the strangest burst of mingled rage, incredulity, bewilderment, and wonder—"She says I'm a liar!"
He looked at me, waiting.
"A liar?" I feebly repeated.
"A liar! She says she'll only marry me on one condition—that I stop my lying. When she first said it I thought she was laughing at me, then I suddenly saw that she was in the deadliest earnest. I asked her what she meant. She said that she couldn't conceive that I didn't know, that I must know, how wicked it was to tell the untruthful stories that I did, the harm that they worked and so on. I! A liar! I!—Why, you might say it about some fellows, but about me!... Why, Lester, she simply didn't believe that I'd had any of the fun, been to any of the places, seen anything.... Of course, I see what it is. She's never been anywhere, seen anything herself. Everything's strange to her. But to say that everyone knew I was a liar.... Lester, tell me. You've been about. You know I'm not a liar, don't you?"
His astonishment was the most genuine thing I'd ever faced. I admit that I was staggered by it. I had not, of course, supposed that he had deliberately said to himself: "Now to-day I'm going to tell a lie so as to astonish those fellows," but I had imagined that he knew quite well it had not all been true.
But here, in the face of his most ingenuous astonishment, what was I to say?
"No, Jones, of course not—lies is the wrong word altogether, but I do think that sometimes you've exaggerated."
He stared at me.
"Do they all think that?"