“THEY can’t? Why do you talk to me of ‘them’? I’m not engaged to ‘them’!” she said with a shrill little laugh.
“Oh Francie I am! And it’s they who are buried beneath that filthy rubbish!”
She flushed at this characterisation of Mr. Flack’s epistle, but returned as with more gravity: “I’m very sorry—very sorry indeed. But evidently I’m not delicate.”
He looked at her, helpless and bitter. “It’s not the newspapers in your country that would have made you so. Lord, they’re too incredible! And the ladies have them on their tables.”
“You told me we couldn’t here—that the Paris ones are too bad,” said Francie.
“Bad they are, God knows; but they’ve never published anything like that—poured forth such a flood of impudence on decent quiet people who only want to be left alone.”
Francie sank to a chair by the table as if she were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms spread out on the lamplit plush she looked up at him. “Was it there you saw it?”
He was on his feet opposite, and she made at this moment the odd reflexion that she had never “realised” he had such fine lovely uplifted eyebrows. “Yes, a few days before I sailed. I hated them from the moment I got there—I looked at them very little. But that was a chance. I opened the paper in the hall of an hotel—there was a big marble floor and spittoons!—and my eyes fell on that horror. It made me ill.”
“Did you think it was me?” she patiently gaped.
“About as soon as I supposed it was my father. But I was too mystified, too tormented.”