'I don't mind anything. I don't mind your being technically German a scrap. All I think is that it was a little—well, perhaps a little excessive to marry another German when you had done it once already. But then I'm always rather on the side of frugality. I do definitely prefer the few instead of the many and the little instead of the much.'
'In husbands as well?'
'Well yes—I think so.'
Dolly sighed.
'I wish I had been like that,' she said. 'It would have saved poor Kitty so much.'
She dropped the currants she held in her hands slowly bunch by bunch into the basket.
'But I don't see,' I said, 'what difference it could make to Kitty. I mean, once you had started having German husbands at all, what did it matter one more or less? And wasn't the second one d—I mean, hadn't he left off being alive when the war began? So I don't see what difference it could make to Kitty.'
'But that's just what you've got to realise,' said Dolly, letting the last bunch of currants drop out of her hand into the basket.
She looked at me, and I became aware that she was slowly turning red. A very delicate flush was slowly spreading over her face, so delicate that for a moment I didn't see what it was that was making her look more and more guilty, more and more like a child who has got to confess—but an honourable, good child, determined that it will confess.
'You know,' she said, 'that I've lived in Germany for years and years.'