When Henrietta Bates told Miss Susan that Freeman Todder was her husband, she told the truth, with the sole exception that her name was not Henrietta Bates nor his Freeman Todder, but all her other stories regarding Freeman and the mythical Billy Vane were lies. Henrietta was not a wicked woman; she was the kindest-hearted woman that ever lived; always ready and eager to do a kindness and full of pity for those who, like Lem, seemed to be in trouble.

The trouble with Henrietta, to use that name as the most convenient, was that she was romantic. She was one of those women—and there are men like her—who live a few inches above the tops of their own heads so that their words have to jump above solid facts in order to give satisfaction to their imaginations.

In Riverbank there is a phrase, used when small boys like Lem take a huge helping of food and fail to consume it, to the effect that their eyes are bigger than their stomachs. Henrietta's desire for romance was bigger than her facts. She was a romantic liar, filling in the gap between what was true and what she wished was true with details that were not true. In other words, Henrietta was a born romancer.

There are many such, and it is remarkable how many escape discovery and humiliation. It is always a little regrettable when one of the pleasanter of the kind is discovered and humiliated. There are women—and men—who live their entire lives in a golden haze of untruths, who do no one any great harm and who get immense momentary pleasure (and whole ecstasies of pleasant pain of conscience) out of their romantic prevarications.

Most often it is no one's particular business to grasp one of these lies and by unpleasant cross-questioning and investigating prove the romancer a liar. The one who does such cross-questioning is usually a most disagreeable person—the sort of nosey, rudely inquisitive person none of us likes.

I have given a great deal of thought to lies, having been a well-known liar myself before I reformed, and being an admirer of the late Mark Twain, who was a connoisseur in this field, I have classified human beings in four rough groups:

1. Those, like Miss Susan Redding, who sin not and tell no lies.

2. Those, like Lem, who sin and tell the truth about it, because they cannot tell a lie.

3. Those, like Henrietta, who lie romantically and without evil intent, but who are so weakened by it that, although they would not lie to do intentional harm, do come in time, as Henrietta had come, to lie in self-protection or to protect another.

4. Those who, like Freeman Todder, will lie to do another harm or to win the liar personal advantage, or for any other reason whatever.

Lem, being a boy, was, in my opinion, more or less of a “freak” as the botanists would say. The young are, and should be up to a certain age, unethical. This has the advantage that we can take them when they are innocent of ethics and drill into them the variety of ethics we want them to have. The undrilled youngster, faced with trouble, will tell a fib or the truth quite indifferently, as seems desirable at the moment.

Of course, we begin the drilling at an extremely early age, in these days, and a boy of five has often learned that it is nobler to be spanked for stealing the pie than for lying about it. But he has to be taught, and Lem had not been taught. There had been nothing in his early lack of training to teach him that lying was wrong. He had never been spanked for lying, or shut in a closet for lying, or even scolded or wept over for lying. He had been born with the ability to lie left out of him, or so weak that it shriveled up and blew away before he learned to talk. In the matter of being unable to tell a lie Lem was not to blame; he was born that way.

Neither should we be inclined to blame Henrietta too severely if she romanced frequently, with eyes that looked frankly into other eyes while she was telling whoppers. Henrietta was a mature woman, healthy and attractive, but her ethical development had been arrested when she was about five years old, while her romantic imagination had continued to grow. Henrietta was, in this one respect, abnormal.

We all know, or have known, girls or boys of seven to sixteen years who tell awful lies. There are others who pick up things that don't belong to them; who slip upstairs in a neighbor's house when unwatched and open dresser drawers; otherwise nice girls and boys who just can't help doing such things. Nearly all have frank, honest eyes. They look you in the eyes with saintly innocence and say they did not do it. They are cases of arrested ethical development and cannot help doing what they do. They are abnormal.

Friends and neighbors often say, “Etta Bates is such a liar! Dear, dear! Mrs. Bates ought to take a strap to her. I'd wale that child within an inch of her life, but I'd cure her!” Beating such a child does no good, nor would locking it in prison cure it. The trouble is deeper.

Henrietta had been a handsome girl. At twelve her physical development was that of a young woman of eighteen. She was enthusiastic, noisy, healthy, and untruthful. She liked to romp, especially with boys. She never knew her lessons, because she did not waste time on them, but she was at the head of all when it came to games. When her little friends were still dressing dolls Henrietta had developed the “he said” habit. Judged by Henrietta's tales all the boys were mad over her and thought of nothing else.

A year or so later Henrietta began to be caught in lies. She told her child companions she had gone to dances, gallantly escorted, when she had been safe in bed all the while. Mothers began to say, “I would n't play with Henrietta any more than necessary.”

Henrietta told lies about any subject that at the moment promised to glitter more brilliantly as a lie than as a truth. She said her mother was making her a blue silk dress with red bead embroidery in a sort of Greek design, and the skirt only shoe-top length, when her mother was making her no dress at all. She said her mother was going to take her to New York in the fall, so she could go to a private school where Mr. Vanderbilt's daughters went, and that she was going to room with Mr. Vanderbilt's daughter, when her mother in her wildest dreams had never thought of any such thing. Things like these Henrietta told not only to children, but to grown-ups. She told the minister that her mother had told her to ask him what college she ought to attend if she was going to be a missionary. All this was unpremeditated. She had happened to be passing the minister's house, so she just dropped in and began lying in her frank-eyed, innocent way. The minister believed her until he spoke to her mother. Then there were tears and he agreed to do what he could to reform Henrietta. The result was that she joined the church and went on lying. She was then fourteen.

More frequently her lies had to do with love affairs. She had no love affairs, but she invented them. If, returning from school, a boy walked a block or two with her, she filled every one's ears with tales of his attentions. It was about that time she began buying herself presents—cheap beads, plated pins and bracelets—which she said the boys had given her, and began, also, writing herself “notes” and letters, which she read to the girls, saying the boys had written them.

All the while, except when her romancing made trouble and led to hot flashes of resentment, every one liked Henrietta. She was kind to every one, and polite, and helpful in many small ways. Being found out in her prevarications did not seem to worry her long; it frightened her stunningly at times, making her gasp, but the fright did not last. In a few moments it was all over. The whippings her mother gave her, until she was too big to be whipped, hardly annoyed her. She was fearless physically; she never admitted that anything hurt her.

Her mother, a worried little woman, suffered most. The father was a traveling salesman and not often home, and Mrs. Bates kept from him as much of Henrietta's misdoing as she could, killing herself eventually, crushing herself under the weight of the burden. She would have worried herself away earlier than she did had the Bates family not moved as often as it did. As Henrietta reached high-school age, and later, the Bates family was moving continually, Mr. Bates changing from one job to another and each time taking his family to his new headquarters. Each time Mrs. Bates tried to obscure herself and Henrietta, but never with much success because Henrietta did not wish to be obscured.

One particularly unfortunate lie got Henrietta expelled from a high school she was attending and she was sent to a private school. It was a strict school, and during her entire stay there she met no young men, but her letters to her friends and to her mother were filled with romantic incidents. It was then her famous Billy Vane first appeared in her lies.

Lying—whole-souled, brazen lying—has a strange, half-hypnotic effect on many hearers who are by nature truthful and kind-hearted, as quite a few human beings are. When a man looks me full in the eyes and lies to me, I have a feeling of shame. I want to lower my eyes and not look straight into his. I say to myself, “He is lying, and I know he is lying, and I am ashamed to look him in the eyes; he will see in my eyes that I know he is lying.” Then I say to myself, “But if I look down he will know I am looking down because I know he is lying.” So I continue to look him straight in the eyes, saying to myself, “I know you are lying, but I will not let you know I know it.” Then I say to myself, “It does not matter if you are lying as long as I know you are lying”; and presently I am sorry for him, as a mother is sorry for a cripple child, and I pity him, and pity is akin to love. Some whole-souled, brazen, cheerful liars are among the best-loved men in the world. We know we are being lied to, but we are also being charmed, as the innocent bird is charmed by the serpent.

Although Henrietta never understood it, the ease with which she made herself believed was one reason why she continued to be such a liar. Her eyes compelled belief. No one ever doubted her lies at the moment they were being told. When her eyes looked straight into the hearer's eyes there could be no doubting; that sometimes came later when the self-hypnotism was dissipated. Had Henrietta—especially when she grew older and was a woman—met doubt or distrust when she told her fanciful tales, she might have faltered, thought, and stopped. She might have been cured.

After her mother's death Henrietta taught school. That she taught in a town that had not known her was helpful, undoubtedly. What lies she told there about her romances in other places were readily enough believed. She was a satisfactory, commanding teacher, having little trouble with her students, and a fine, clean figure always, in her black shirt, white shirt-waist, and a peculiarly clean neatness. She had a gesture of smoothing her trim waist downward toward her belt with the edges of her hands that was in itself a certificate of clean spinsterhood.

Her misfortune came suddenly and with catastrophic unexpectedness. She had worked her way upward until she was teaching mathematics (higher algebra, to be exact) in the high school of a southern Illinois town. With the teachers of a near-by river town she had kept in close correspondence and for them she had built a romance of lies, telling of a lover who was impetuous, young, handsome, and brilliant—“too young for poor me,” Henrietta had written, and “his father objects, and if there is a match it will have to be a run-away one. His name”—she had hesitated, fearing to use “Billy Vane” lest she might have used it before—“is Freeman Todder,” she had written, jotting down that of the “A Class” boy who had remained in the classroom while she was writing the letter. Followed much more, romantically untruthful, but interesting and intended to be so. The next week two of her teacher friends to whom she had written, wrote her they meant to make her a visit; they were wild to meet Freeman Todder, they wrote.

Henrietta had one of her sudden panics. She was sitting at her desk in the schoolroom when she read the letter and she looked toward Freeman Todder. The unlucky youth was passing a note across the aisle.

“Freeman, come here!” Henrietta commanded, and he arose and walked to her desk. He was as tall then as he was ever to become. He was one of those boys who think they are already men, and who have begun to accumulate the vices of bad men, considering them evidences of maturity. He was already one of the town dandies.

“What's the matter now?” he asked when he stood at her desk.

“You know what is the matter,” she said. “This cannot go on, Freeman. I want to talk to you. Remain after school.”

He went back to his seat with swaggering bravado, and made especial efforts to break more of the few slight rules Henrietta had imposed on the scholars. He hoped she would notice and expel him. He hated school and wanted to be free to lead a man's life.

“It will be all the better for him,” Henrietta told herself, excusing herself, during the short hours of courtship to which she subjected him before they “eloped.”

“I can make something out of him and if I do not he will go to ruin. He is headed that way and there is no one to stop him if I do not.”

She convinced herself that this was so. As for Freeman, in his egotism he imagined he was doing the courting. He imagined it was he proposed the elopement. He felt he was a clever, sophisticated man of the world to be able to annex the love of this rather magnificent woman, to make her throw her arms around him and weep wildly on his shoulder.

He strutted considerably among the other cheap dandies of the town for a few days, and then they eloped, if abducting a silly youth can be called eloping, and were married. It made a great row in the town, of course, and Freeman and Henrietta did not dare to return.

The triumph of feeling that her friends would find all she had said in her letters was the truth did not last long. She tried to coax Freeman to go to work, so that they might live the life of a respectable married couple, but Todder was of little account and was made less so by a growing feeling that somehow Henrietta had played a trick on him, and by his early discovery that she was a liar. What the trick was he did not bother to make sure, but he felt that it was her fault that they were married and that it was her business now to take care of him.

Henrietta was contrite of heart beyond all question. She felt that she had done Freeman a vast and irreparable wrong, and, as he became more and more worthless, she blamed herself and not him. Whatever he was and however he acted it was her duty to bear with him and protect him.

The years had been miserable ones. The pair had reached some low depths—penniless days—but at last Henrietta had won her way into the Riverbank schools under her assumed name of Henrietta Bates, posing as an unmarried woman.

This was the Henrietta who left Miss Susan pacified and went up to see Lem. She carried a bag of the largest, yellowest oranges she had been able to buy. She was in most respects the kindest and most thoughtful of women. She was liked and respected by all. She had seemed, a few days earlier, the safest and happiest of women. Now her whole world seemed about to topple upon her from all sides, crushing her in a chaos of disgrace and infamy.