“Yes,” he said, “that’s quite true! But, Mrs. Otway? I’m very, very sorry to have been proved right. And I fear that you must feel it very much, as you have so many German friends.”
“I haven’t many German friends now,” she said quickly. “I had as a girl, and of course I’ve kept up with two or three of them, as you know. But it’s true that the whole thing is a great shock and—and a great pain to me. Unlike you, I’ve always thought very well of Germans.”
“Ah, but not in my sense!” She could not help smiling a little ruefully. “You know I never thought of them in your sense at all—I mean not as soldiers.”
There was a pause, a long and rather painful pause, between them.
CHAPTER IX
Major Guthrie looked at Mrs. Otway meditatively.
Apart from his instinctive attraction for her—an attraction which had sprung into being the very first time they had met, at a dinner party at the Deanery—he had always regarded her as an exceptionally clever woman. She was able to do so much more than most of the ladies he had known. To his simple soldier mind there was something interesting and, well, yes, rather extraordinary, in a woman who sat on committees, who could hold her own so well in argument, and who yet remained very feminine, sometimes—so he secretly thought—quite delightfully absurd and inconsequent, with it all.
Major Guthrie had always been sorry that Mrs. Otway and his mother didn’t exactly hit it off. His mother had once been a beauty, and was now a rather shrewish, sharp-tongued old lady, who had outlived most of the people and most of the things she had cared for in life. Mrs. Otway irritated Mrs. Guthrie. The old lady despised the still pretty widow’s eager, interested, enthusiastic outlook on life.
Suddenly Major Guthrie took a large pocket-book out of his right breast pocket. He opened it, and Mrs. Otway saw that it contained a packet of bank-notes held together by an india-rubber band. There was also an empty white envelope in the pocket-book. Slipping off the band, he began counting the notes. When he had counted four, she called out, “Stop! Stop! I am only giving you a twenty-pound cheque.” And then she saw that they were not five-pound notes, as she had supposed, but ten-pound notes.