“Meaning—if you had fallen in love with a good man at the psychological moment of trying to be good. You’re too accommodating altogether, my child. Suppose it were a bad man, and the clock struck while you were pulling that face?”
Deb went to the mirror, and tried on the two faces, one after another. “Which becomes me best?” she demanded anxiously, “Puritan or rogue? Oh, Antonia, it was such fun busting the Phillips’ illusion. I shall never have such fun again.”
II
Samson was sent to the Front shortly afterwards. And Beatrice confided in her mother-in-law, Trudchen Redbury, her amazement that any girl could so far lose her reason as thrice to refuse a match like Samson Phillips: “She must have said something to upset him badly, that last time—but he won’t say what; he seemed heart-broken, poor fellow ... and going off like that, too, without any hope. How could she?”
Trudchen also wondered how Deb possibly could ... and discussed the matter with Otto, who was thus at last brought face to face with the failure of his cherished notion of a marriage between his little daughter Nell, and an officer in the British army: “He vanted Ferdinand’s Teporah? Ach wass! but I thought she and that yong Gennedy——” He remembered how the insolent pair had “called” on the Redburys one Sunday afternoon, for all the world as tho’ they were engaged. And then had followed Cliffe’s confidence in the train ... the name left chivalrously blank ... and not feeling at all friendly towards Deb, who had robbed him of an English son-in-law, Otto, by sudden malignant inspiration, inserted her name into the blank, and was instantly convinced of the correctness of his guess: “So! and zat vos vy she refused Villips!”
Otto sucked at his lips, very gravely ... genuinely shocked and buffeted by the revelation that a maiden of the same race and class and upbringing as his own daughter, could so step aside from virtue. But then he ceased sucking, blew out his cheeks ... and ruminated....
That poor Ferdinand: with all his eccentric notions of rearing a young girl, one must yet be sorry for him. His daughter was no better than a—than a—Otto hesitated between a rich selection of epithets in two languages.
One must be sorry for Ferdinand. But it was a pity that he should not know that there was a cause why one was sorry for him—(Ferdie had always been the successful partner in the days when Nash, Marcus and Rothenburg had still existed as a firm).... Bread and water and a locked room would do the minx good.
And in addition to all this, Otto was sufficiently akin in spirit to both Cliffe and Deb to relish the notion of dramatic tidings—himself as a sort of Messenger in Greek drama.
“If I do not tell Ferdinand Marcus, then zertainly another will do so——”