The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved Fräulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise fiercely, kicked at her shins and tried to bite her hands, screaming: “You shall not call our own precious Fräulein names. Harpy, your own self!”
And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and echoed, “Harpy, your own self!”
It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: “But, my darlings, you don’t know what you are saying. The Lusitania was a beautiful ship––”
The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: “She wasn’t as beautiful as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond.”
Marie Louise condescended to argue: “Oh yes, she was! She was a great ship, noble like Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and she was loaded with passengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore them from their mothers’ arms and ran off with them, choking and strangling them and dragging them down and down––forever down.”
She was dizzied by the horde of visions mobbing her brain. Then the onrush of horror was checked abruptly as she saw the supercilious lad regarding her frenzy calmly. His comment was:
“It served ’em jolly well right for bein’ on ’at old boat.”
Marie Louise almost swooned with dread of such a soul. She shrank from the boy and groaned, “Oh, you toad, you little toad!”
He was frightened a little by her disgust, and he took refuge in a higher authority. “Fräulein told us. And she knows.”