"Dear Marion," he said, "I have no objection to your going to balls as décolletée as ever you please, for you are beautiful ..." and he kissed her neck; "but I do beg you not to exhibit yourself like this again."
Marion coloured and answered: "Yes, you're right, Hubby! Now I know why Fröben and Landsberg were staring at me so."
Then she pouted: "But Frau von Gropphusen looked nice dressed like this!"
Her husband answered quietly: "My child, 'quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.'"
"What? What does that mean?"
Kauerhof translated gallantly, "You are prettier than the Gropphusen, my Marion; but she is thinner than you."
For one must be polite to a wife who is by birth a von Lüben, and the daughter of the head of a department in the War Office.
Reimers was not, like his comrades, accustomed to spend the greater part of his leisure in frivolity and flirting. It therefore never occurred to him to conceal his admiration for Frau von Gropphusen.
It often happened that he missed the easiest balls, fascinated in watching the movements and graceful attitudes of his opponent. Her feet, which even in the unflattering tennis-shoes looked small and dainty, seemed merely to skim over the ground like the wings of a passing swallow; and the most daring bounds and leaps, which in others would have been grotesque, she accomplished with the easy agility of a cat.
Reimers asked himself where his eyes had been that all this should hitherto have passed him unnoticed. He thought he had never seen anything so exquisite. But Hannah Gropphusen would scold him when he stood gazing thus in naïve admiration.