She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.
Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of the gear drowned the sound of another man’s voice calling her name. This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away before he could overtake her.
Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss Webling “Mees Vapelink.” The Teutonic intonation did not fall pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women, too.
The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly with the Teutonic r. Davidge studied him and began to remember him. He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind, ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph’s home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for anybody he hates.
He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man into a restless swain.
Davidge resented Easton’s claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling’s German accent. An icy fear chilled him.
His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude, and endless trouble.
Davidge’s head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:
“Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe’s? Why was she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero’s dinner, and to keep me from keeping my engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much German association?”