Bertram continues to gaze abstractedly at the hotel roof.
“But why, oh why, let her wear highlows?” continues Marlow. “They would deform a goddess.”
Suddenly, with the sense of taking a plunge into water of unknown depth, the man whom he torments faces what he considers an imperative obligation.
“The young person in the highlows is my future wife,” he says between his teeth. “You will be so good as to make your jokes about some other matter than her ankles.”
Marlow stares, utterly incredulous and stupefied.
“Good Lord! you can’t mean it! Your wife? Why, she is—she is—she is a very decent sort of girl no doubt; I should be sorry to imply the contrary, but——”
“Be so good as to understand that I am not in jest. That is the—the—the daughter of the people who I am about to marry.”
“Oh, Lord!”
Marlow drops into a chair, so astonished that he could not recover his speech. Annie is too far off to hear, and there is no one else within earshot except a groom on the other side of the rails; the policeman has gone on down the road.
“I was much to blame,” says Bertram, in his chilliest manner, “not to make the announcement yesterday when you asked who were the Brown family. My reticence was a weakness of which I am sincerely ashamed.”