“I’d like to get back to London,” she said. “Here one must be wicked or starve to death. I have a sister who’s good. She’s a dressmaker. She earns sixty marks a day, sewing on buttons and hooks. It costs her more than that to buy a chemise. She goes to bed when she gets her underclothes washed, once a month. Now she had tuberculosis from unternährung.”
“What’s that?” asked Bertram.
“What you call under-feeding. Starvation is another name for it. All the good people suffer from unternährung. My mother died from it in the war, when none of us had enough to eat, whatever our virtue. You English made us suffer like that. Your blockade.”
“Yes,” said Bertram.
“It was rather cruel, don’t you think? After the war you kept the blockade up until Peace was signed. You made war against our babies and killed thousands, so that we should be starved into surrender. That wasn’t what you call playing the game.”
“The war game,” said Bertram. “You would have been harder with us if you had won.”
“That’s true. War is perhaps as cruel as peace. Most men are devils, and women she-devils.”
“Some of them are pretty decent,” said Bertram. “If they get a chance. The ordinary crowd.”
“You are not cruel,” she answered. “You are kind. You have kind eyes, and you talk to me as though I were a good woman. I would love you very much if you would let me. What do you say, English boy?”
“I must be going,” said Bertram.