ly, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs.
Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not
even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest
interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and
daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In
an account which Clemens once set down of the "Siege and Season of
Unveracity," as he called it, he said:

Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a
hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen
dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and
happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in
her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a
truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara's
reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's
mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never
doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities
without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a
small and simple one the case would have been different. I was
never able to get a reputation like Clara's. Mrs. Clemens
questioned Clara every day concerning Jean's health, spirits,
clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying
herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute
detail--every word of it false, of course. Every day she had to
tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean's
existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects
out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention,
she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably
would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her
mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more
money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income
justified.

Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara's busy days of this period,
as written at the time by Clemens to Twichell and to Mrs. Crane, are
eminently worth preserving. To Mrs. Crane:

Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother
having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact
and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be)
toward train-time dressed in a wrapper.