On lying, part 10

Guild cleared his throat. "She told us about finding this here chain and knife on the floor where the Wolf dame had most likely broke it off fighting with Wynant, and she told us the reasons why she'd hid it till now. Between me and you, that don't make any too much sense, looking at it reasonably, but maybe that ain't the way to look at it in this case. To tell you the plain truth, I don't know what to make of her in a lot of ways, I don't for a fact."

"The chief thing," I advised them, "Is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people -- even women -- get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her."

-- Detective Guild and Nick Charles, in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, chapter 25, pp.123-124 

It has been years now, but when I read these lines yesterday it felt exactly like life with Wife. Probably I'm overdramatizing, or giving her too much credit. If I think about it, I recollect that I could often (usually? or maybe only sometimes?) tell when she was lying, and if I felt like I had to I could sometimes break her down to what appeared to be the truth. So maybe she wasn't really a Mimi Jorgenson. But dear God it was tiring.