This last, with that insistence on a rigorous and formal respect necessary in such painful cases where respect could not any more be taken for granted as the lady’s due.
Deb smiled when she received it. “Nell can easily be shunted. Is white muslin too obvious? I s’pose so. It had better be my spotted pink, which is a bad fit. And the Leghorn hat with the spray of Alexandra roses that doesn’t match the dress. Surely no girl would wear two mouldy shades of pink unless she were a reformed character. Good Lord! my hair! How am I to account for it?”
She fingered a temptation to dare the risk of winning him back by means he most disapproved of—peacock and gold jumper of the wickedest cut; conversation to match, all a-flicker with brilliant unconventionality; the siren method? It would be infinitely more fun; and a personal triumph if she succeeded.
But no. Richard’s peace of mind hung on the issue; she must take the safest way.
II
Ten days later, Samson for the fourth time proposed to her. She accepted him.
After the first interview, it was easy. She had only to be passive; or to smooth down any little creases in her texture that she perceived could still cause him uneasiness. That first interview was her greatest performance. She blended timid womanly solicitude with that type of earnest frankness in big and little things, which was to be interpreted—by him—as the outcome of an inner consciousness of once having failed greatly in moral steadfastness and the resolve never again to be betrayed into so doing. She thought his intelligence could be trusted to perceive that much subtlety, unaided. He did perceive it. And approved. He approved also of her confusion at his jocular reference to the forget-me-not stream. “Don’t tell me you went down there alone to pick forget-me-nots?” “Oh, but I did. I wouldn’t——” she stopped. And hastily asked him how he liked his tea. “Wouldn’t go with any other man.”... Samson smiled under his moustache. So that special glide of silver beneath the plank bridge, had associations for her, too. Good! he liked sentiment in girls. He was a sentimental chap himself, but in his case it was sheathed in sternness. He was a soldier—and she was a sinner.... Never let him forget that.
She never let him forget it. Not once in the prescribed hour. Intuition pointed out that it was labour lost to try and make him forget. Therefore he must be brought to forgive.
“So Delilah has been shorn instead of Samson? That’s poetic justice, isn’t it?” Then, chaffing no more: “What made you cut your hair, Deb? I don’t like it. It’s like those artist-model girls you see about. I hoped you’d go on arranging it the way Beattie did it for you, once. It suited you.”
“But it took so long,” Deb explained. And further, in an outburst of confidence: “It was stupid of me—I’m sorry now. But—it was just a mood—one evening, when I had to dash off to the canteen—and it would keep on flopping down after I’d pinned it up ... and it seemed to me there was so much to do in the world just now, beside one’s hair—so much to do and so little time to do it in—And ... Oh, I lost my temper with it and just sheared it off. Does it look hideous?”