Well—now at least she was free. Samson would never again desire her for his wife. Mrs Phillips would never again invite her to dinner. Although Deb had chosen a drastic method of dealing with undesirable invitations to dinner or to the altar—“do they have altars in a Synagogue? I forget ... but oh, I wish he would speak before I laugh!”
But Samson’s principles, against which in sheer despair she had flung her falsehood, stood rigid and undamaged, like so many spear-tipped railings. Henceforth, Deb was to him an outcast. He looked at her ... and then he went to the door and called his mother, and told her Deb was not feeling very well and wanted to return home at once.
Mrs Phillips gathered from his expression that “that girl” had flouted him again. Deb was sent home in a taximeter and an atmosphere of black disgrace. Samson’s one look had reminded her of a Roundhead soldier—Oliver Cromwell himself. What a fate to have escaped—Cromwell’s wife, Cromwell’s family. And a Jewish Cromwell into the bargain!
“But will he tell—anybody?”
“What does it matter!”
An impulse of sheer mischief—then swift contrition—intense relief—and the usual shoulder-shrug. This was the wheel of Deb’s psychology. Several days later she told Antonia of the debâcle. Antonia had meanwhile been out of town, driving her Major-General.
“Samson would never have done for you, of course. But you encouraged him, Deb. Why?”
“I didn’t,” sunnily; “I just wanted to try if I could make myself good enough. And I pulled it off—for a fortnight.”
“And then, in one well-chosen lie—Deb, I love you very dearly, but your creed is beyond all following. It seems to me to consist mainly of a lot of trouble for nothing.”
“I just wanted to try,” Deb repeated. “I might have been good enough, you know. And if the clock had struck while I was pulling that face, I’d have stopped like that. So Nurse used to say.”