“There—what do you say to that?” and Beatrice stepped back a pace or two while Mrs Phillips hovered round the victim.... “A little more off the forehead and ears,” she pronounced; “she has such nice little ears; so why not show them?”
Deb, accustomed to the thick tumble of hair to her eyebrows, and its warm cluster round her cheeks, stared aghast at her scalped and naked renaissance in the hand-glass Beatrice held up for her benefit. She might have cried with the famous savage who was asked why he did not feel the stress of the weather upon his person: “Me all face!”
“Doesn’t she look sweet?” Beatrice cried. And Mrs Phillips assented with less of majesty than usual: “It does indeed make a difference.”
“Come down and let Sa——the others see!” Deb was urged to the door and down the stairs, and pushed into the drawing-room, where by now the whole party were assembled.
“How do you like her?”
Truly abashed, head hanging, cheeks a crimson blaze, the girl stood just inside the doorway, while the expected chorus smote her unmuffled hearing:
“Hullo ... Beatrice at her old games.... By Jove, what a change! So she has got ears, has she? I often wondered.... Greedy little Delilah! all that hair, and then wanting Samson’s into the bargain!... Turn round—no, slowly.... It does suit you, Deb—you must always wear it like that....”
“Do you consider it an improvement, Samson?” enquired Samson’s mother.
“Yes.”
She could feel his eyes upon her—eyes of hot proprietorship—and knew all the sensations of the slave-girl exploited in the market-place for critical appraisement. The veiling had been ripped from large tracts of her person, leaving them bare—bare.... Deb, who could be quite happily unembarrassed, even unconscious, when the delicious cream-white slenderness of her limbs was exposed to view, who would not have minded a whit any haphazard spectator of her evening bath, cheek rubbed contentedly against her own satiny damp shoulder, loving the huddled contact, Deb now underwent sheer agony at the novelty of stark forehead, ears, and nape of the neck. The erection on top of her head felt rickety, top-heavy; all the separate hairs dragged the wrong way, as hair is prone to do when forced out of its groove; the Phillips went on exclaiming, suggesting, twisting her about and around, trying the effects of her hat on the new coiffure.... And it was not so difficult to refuse Samson when, on the way home, he proposed to her for the second time.