Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.
“Very well, then,” Mendel continued; “you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down.”
“Do please drink your tea,” said Clowes. “It is getting cold.”
Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:—
“I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter.”
Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic.
“Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?”
“Her hair?” cried Mendel. “Her beautiful hair?”
“Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it.”