She looked at Gorman and then at me, evidently expecting us to make a confession of friendship for her. Gorman wriggled in a way that made me think the carving of the chair must be sticking into him somewhere. But he did not fail Mrs. Ascher.
“You were right,” he said with deep feeling, “altogether right.”
I was not going to be outdone by Gorman.
“‘A friend,’” I said, “‘must bear a friend’s infirmities.’”
The quotation was not wholly happy, but Mrs. Ascher seemed to like it. She smiled gratefully.
“My husband,” she said.
I knew it must be her husband’s affairs which were troubling her.
“He is in a very difficult position,” I said. “I had a long talk with him the other night. It seems to me that he has to choose between——”
Gorman interrupted me.
“He’s in an infernally awkward hole,” he said. “The English people will lose their tempers to a certainty, not at first perhaps, but as soon as anything goes against them. When they do they’ll make things damnably unpleasant for any one who’s suspected of being German or even remotely connected with Germany. That’s the sort of people the English are. And Ascher is just the man they’ll fasten on at once. They’ll hunt him down.”