Her smile subtly mocked him. “Ah, but you see, I have—not—been—good.”
CHAPTER VII
I
But Cliffe Kennedy was indubitably to blame. No one could spend so much time with Cliffe as Deb had done of late, without echoing his tendency to achieve a climax at whatever cost. His sense of dramatic effect abhorred a vacuum. Deb had caught the trick, that was all. She was always impressionable. “I have treated you with the respect due to a good girl ...” and then the pause—and, spoken almost mechanically, her curtain line.
“Well—he asked for it!”
The drawback to these histrionic displays in ordinary life, however, is lack of the aforesaid curtain. Certainly it should have fallen at that juncture: “You see, I have not been good ...” and Act III a fortnight later.... Meanwhile, Deb and Samson remained looking at one another, in Mrs Phillips’ boudoir, her head proudly tilted, so that the little three-cornered face was fore-shortened to an upcurling of black eye-lashes, and mouth a mutinous half-crescent, the corners trembling to a smile sternly chidden back again—“This is serious!”—but the irrepressible desire persisted.... Samson’s expression was such a marvel of Pharisaic indignation and disgust.
“So much for the charity of a good man’s love! Why, supposing it had been true and I wanted him to forgive me?”
In Samson Phillips’ mind was no doubt of the statement which had shattered his rock-embedded belief in the immaculate chastity of a well brought up Jewish girl of his own set.... The argument: “Why should she say such a thing if it weren’t true?” was too obviously undeniable for admittance. And Deb could have explained to him neither the contagious peculiarity of Mr Cliffe Kennedy, nor the fact that the Phillips’ family and the thrice persistent proposal had rendered her hysterical.