“Are you alone?”
“Richard!”
Deb shrank with a cold sense of shock at sight of his face, from which all fleshiness had contracted to a drawn covering of the bony structure; hollows in the cheeks; hard mouth; and eyes that had known persecution.... “Richard, what is it? I haven’t seen you for about six weeks. Have you been ill?”
“No. I say, are you alone?”
“Yes; La llorraine and Manon won’t be in for ages.”
“You—you—you’ve got to marry Samson Phillips.”
“I mean.... I want you to,” when he saw her choking bewilderment.
Deb perceived that he was in extremes. “I’ll do anything, Richard.” She just touched him with her hand. And he stumbled forward and put his head down in her lap and began to cry.
“Richard ... dear old boy ...” she was athrill with terror now. It was horrible to hear him, with the knowledge how his normal self, the self which for seventeen years had stood for all that was chunky and gruff and pugnacious, was abhorring, or would presently return to abhor, this sudden utter breakdown of all control. “Tell me—oh do tell me,” Deb pleaded to the hunched suffering curve of his shoulders.
“They won’t leave us alone ... the pink heads. Deb—rows of pink heads everywhere—you can see them from the top—yes, sitting round tables ... all over England: ‘Intern the Alien Enemy.’ But it isn’t that so much; I’m getting used to the thought of it, for me; one year—not quite—and I shall be interned.... What’s the word make you feel?—cold iron and damp black earth. But it isn’t that——”