Yet it was not Cupid’s good opinion she worked for, with might and main.
The rate of her upward progress in Mary’s estimation could be gauged by the fact that the day came when the elder girl spoke openly to her of her crime. At the first merciless words Laura winced hotly, both at and for the tactlessness of which Mary was guilty. But, the first shameful stab over, she felt the better of it; yes, it was a relief to speak to someone of what she had borne alone for so long. To speak of it, and even to argue round it a little; for, like most wrongdoers, Laura soon acquired a taste for dwelling on her misdeed. And Mary, being entirely without humour, and also unversed in dealing with criminals, did not divine that this was just a form of self-indulgence. It was Cupid who said: “Look here, Infant, you’ll be getting cocky about what you did, if you don’t look out.”
Mary would not allow that a single one of Laura’s excuses held water.
“That’s the sheerest nonsense. You don’t seem to realise that you tried to defame another person’s moral character,” she said, in the assured, superior way that so impressed Laura. And this aspect of the case, which had never once occurred to her, left Laura open-mouthed; and yet a little doubtful: Mr. Shepherd was surely too far above her, and too safely ensconced in holiness, to be injured by anything she might say. But the idea gave her food for thought; and she even tentatively developed her story along these unfamiliar lines, just to see how it might have turned out.
One night as they were undressing for bed, Mary spoke, with the same fireless depreciation, of the behaviour of a classmate which had been brought to her notice that day. This girl was said to have nefariously “copied” from another, in the course of a written examination; and, as prefect of her class Mary was bound to track the evil down. “I shall make them both show me their papers as soon as they get them back; and then, if I find proof of what’s being said, I must tackle her. Just as I tackled you, Laura.”
Laura flushed. “Oh, M. P., I’ve never ‘copied’ in my life!” she cried.
“Probably not. But those things all belong in the same box: lying, and ‘copying,’ and stealing.”
“You never will believe me when I say I didn’t know anything about that horrid Chinky. I only told a few crams—that was quite different.”
“I think it’s most unfortunate, Laura, that you persist in clinging to that idea.”
Here M. P. was obliged to pause; for she had put a lock of hair between her teeth while she did something to a plait at the back. As soon as she could speak again, she went on: “You and your few crams! Have you ever thought, pray, what a state of things it would be, if we all went about telling falsehoods, and saying it didn’t matter, they were merely a few little fibs?—What are you laughing at?”
“I’m not laughing. I mean … I just smiled. I was only thinking how funny it would be—Sandy, and old Gurley, and Jim Chapman, all going round making up things that had never happened.”
“You’ve a queer notion of what’s funny. Have you utterly no respect for the truth?”
“Yes, of course I have. But I say”—Laura, who always slipped quickly out of her clothes, was sitting in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, hugging her knees. “I say, M. P., if everybody told stories, and everybody knew everybody else was telling them, then truth wouldn’t be any good any more at all, would it? If nobody used it?”
“What rubbish you do talk!” said Mary serenely, as she shook her toothbrush on to a towel and rubbed it dry.
“As if truth were a soap!” remarked Cupid who was already in bed, reading Nana, and trying to smoke a cigarette under the blankets.
“You can’t do away with truth, child.”
“But why not? Who says so? It isn’t a law.”
“Don’t try to be so sharp, Laura.”
“I don’t mean to, M. P. But what is truth, anyhow?” asked Laura.
“The Bible is truth. Can you do away with the Bible, pray?”
“Of course not. But M. P. … The Bible isn’t quite all truth, you know. My father—” here she broke off in some confusion, remembering Uncle Tom.
“Well, what about him? You don’t want to say, I hope, that he didn’t believe in the Bible?”
Laura drove back the “Of course not!” that was all but over her lips. “Well, not exactly,” she said, and grew very red. “But you know, M. P., whales don’t have big enough throats ever to have swallowed Jonah.”
“Little girls shouldn’t talk about what they don’t understand. The Bible is God’s Word; and God is Truth.”
“You’re a silly infant,” threw in Cupid, coughing as she spoke. “Truth has got to be—and honesty, too. If it didn’t exist, there couldn’t be any state, or laws, or any social life. It’s one of the things that makes men different from animals, and the people who boss us know pretty well what they’re about, you bet when they punish the ruffians who don’t practise it.”
“Yes, now that I see,” agreed Laura eagerly. “Then truth’s a useful thing. Oh, and that’s probably what it means, too, when you say: Honesty is the best Policy.”
“I never heard such a child,” said M. P., shocked. “Cupid, you really shouldn’t put such things into her head. You’re downright immoral, Laura.”
“Oh, how can you say such a horrid thing?”
“Well, your ideas are simply dreadful. You ought to try your hardest to improve them.”
“I do, M. P., really I do.”
“You don’t succeed. I
