"I wish you to understand, Alice, that I will not allow such a system of deception in my house. Margaret has already been notified that one more occasion like that I witnessed, and she leaves her place."
This was plain talk in plain words; and Alice put up her lip with an ugly pout. She did not appear at dinner until her father and aunt were nearly through the first course, and then rendered herself so disagreeable that Joseph called out,—
"Pa, I wish you'd have company every day; Alice acts better when gentlemen are here to see her do so." And he rolled his eyes so exactly in imitation of her action the previous day, that Aunt Clarissa and even her father laughed aloud.
During the weeks which followed, there was scarcely a day passed without proving to Mr. Saunders the entire recklessness of his daughter in regard to the truth. One day he came home and entered the back parlor while she was entertaining a friend in the front one with reminiscences of school life. They were so much engaged they did not notice his entrance, but amid shouts of mirth went on with their conversation.
"But did not Mrs. Lerow require you to study very hard?" asked the visitor.
"Oh, no, indeed!" was the laughing reply. "We had our exercises, of course; but we generally contrived to copy them from one another. Why, half the last term I had my answers written on a paper I held inside my handkerchief; at last the class-teacher mistrusted something from my always being so correct, and asked me up and down whether I had committed the lesson. I told her, of course, I had. It was only a white lie, you know, and everybody tells white lies."
"You remind me of an old lady who visited us last week," rejoined the young girl. "She heard me telling a story at the table, and then repeating it to some callers in the evening. I suppose I did not remember to use exactly the same words, and—do you think she had the impertinence to tell me I had been guilty of falsehood! I excused myself, saying, as you did, 'Everybody tells little lies, or white lies, in these days.'
"'No, my dear,' she said, 'not everybody; I could name several, and among them, some you would call the most polished ladies in the city, who would not, for their right hand, tell a lie, white or black. Truth—simple, unvarnished truth—is their motto, and a beautiful motto it is, such as I wish every young and every old lady would abide by.'
"'But you must own,' I said, 'that almost all fashionable people tell what is called white lies?'
"'I acknowledge that it is far too common,' she went on. 'We are becoming corrupt and unprincipled as a nation; but I will give you one instance where a white lie, and a very innocent one, as the young lady called it, was the means of breaking off a match between two persons who before that had been sincerely attached to each other.'