“You are really letting him off the hook?” Dottie argued.

“You’ve never lied? Never ever?”

“I try not to.”

“So you’re telling me that you told your parents about your pregnancy as soon as you found out?”

Dottie’s face flushed. “That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“I didn’t lie. I just—”

“I just didn’t tell them the truth.” Gladys’s voice was a high-pitched singsong as she mimicked Dottie.

“But—”

“Look, I’m not knocking you for it. I would have done exactly the same thing. I was one of your accomplices, in fact. I took you into my home to prolong the deception. What I’m saying is that you had good reason. Sometimes there is a good reason to lie.”

Margaret watched them as if they were a vaudevillian show, and she had to admit that Gladys had a point. Still, Margaret wanted the satisfaction of their mutual indignation. She was rankled and she wanted Gladys to be too. In fact, Gladys was almost always rankled about something. Why not now? Unless in her ire, she was seeing something that Margaret couldn’t.

“But—” she began.

“Oh, Margaret,” Gladys said, rolling her eyes. “I know all about you telling Oliver that he should let me propose to him. And don’t worry—I’m not mad about that. This is not what it’s about. But it does show that you have your secrets too.

“And,” she continued, without letting anyone respond, “even more than that, do you think George should have told Dottie all these years that he was in love with her?”

“No, but I don’t see—”

Gladys was on a roll. “And why is that?”

“Because of John.”

“Exactly. Because of John and you and your parents and Dottie. If George had told the truth about his feelings, it would have hurt a lot of people. So he kept the secret. Until it was the right time to speak up.”

“Really, Gladys, I don’t think this is the same thing,” Dottie interjected, but the hesitation in her voice told Margaret that she wasn’t as confident as she originally had been.

“It is. The situation is different, and the players are different. But it’s the same thing. He withheld the truth because telling you, Margaret, would have hurt you. I’m not excusing it. But I’m saying that we have all done it. So let she among us who has never lied cast the first stone.”

Margaret laughed. Not a robust one, as she was still buried under the cloud of the morning, but it was as if a life preserver had been thrown into the pool in which she was drowning. She was grabbing on to it. Not yet out of danger but being reeled in to safety.

“Gladys, have you gone biblical on us?” she asked.

Gladys folded her arms and sank back into the couch. “No. It’s just common human knowledge.”