PART III
CHAPTER I
I
Deb was living with La llorraine. She indignantly refused to return home on the understanding that she was to be partially forgiven for an offence she had never committed; on the other hand, her affection for Ferdie caused her a pang of acute misery when she saw how the belief in her sins had stripped him of a certain chubby contentment which even the war and its complications had hitherto left unimpaired. For of course her swift dramatic rupture with her family toppled to an anti-climax. Richard took home the tidings of her whereabouts; and a day after her flight, Aunt Stella appeared at Zoe’s for a parley. The tolerance of the period did not permit an erring daughter to be blasted with a parent’s curse and left to suicide—or worse—in the dark cold streets of London. The tolerance of the period sanctioned some natural anxiety over the said daughter’s material welfare, tentative negotiations, and a return home to a great deal of nagging and an atmosphere of reproachful discomfort. Perhaps Deb foresaw the final inevitable item; perhaps also, her passionate self-persuasion that she could not bear continual witnessing of Ferdie’s sighs and worried forehead, was the outcome of a guilty suspicion that it was more by haphazard than by virtue that she was able to mount her pedestal and stand aggrieved upon it.
“It’s the fault of my very lax upbringing,” she argued with the guilty suspicion.
“Yes, but——”
“It’s lucky that I have a certain fundamental standpoint of moral decency,” with crushing pomposity.
“Yes, but——”
The yes-buts had it.