“I see.” There was no room left for doubt as to her meaning. Nor did he choose to lie. “No, I paid no duties.”
“I feared as much.”
There was a painful silence. George rose, and walking to the mantel-piece, looked down at the hearth and tapped the ironwork with his foot. He would fain have made the best of what he ruefully recognized to be a shabby situation by treating it jocosely; but her grave, grieved demeanor forbade. Yet he ventured to remark:
“Why do you take this so seriously?”
“I expected better things of you.”
He felt of his mustache and essayed extenuation. “It was—er—unworthy of me, of course; foolish—pig-headed—tricky, I suppose. I got mad. I’d nothing to sell, and the declaration is a farce when they examine after it. So I left them to find what they chose. I’m terribly sorry, for you seem to hate it so. But it’s an idiotic and impertinent law, anyway.”
“In other words, you think it all right to break a law if you don’t happen to fancy it.”
George started visibly and colored. He recognized the aphorism as his, but for the moment did not recall the occasion of its use. He chose to evade it by an attempt at banter. “You can’t make a tragedy, my dear girl, out of the failure to pay duties on a few things bought for one’s personal use, and not for sale. Why, nearly every woman in the world smuggles when she gets the chance—on her clothes and finery. You must know that. Your sex as a class doesn’t regard it as disreputable in the least. At the worst, it is a peccadillo, not a crime. The law was passed to enable our native tailors to shear the well-to-do public.”
Mary ignored the plausible indictment against the unscrupulousness of her sex. “Can such an argument weigh for a moment with any one with patriotic impulses?”
Again the parrot-like reminder caused him to wince, and this time he recognized the application.