“There! What do you think of that?” he says, and with a grating laugh he gives her a letter.
“Is it from your mother?”
“Look at it.”
“Is she refusing to receive me?”
“Read it. It’s written in English—for your benefit, apparently.”
Mona reads:
“Oskar,—The contents of your letter have distressed me beyond measure. That a son of mine should think of marrying an Englishwoman—one of the vile and wicked race that killed his sister—is the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
There is more of the same kind—that if Oskar attempts to bring his Englishwoman to Germany his mother will refuse to receive her; that if she did receive her every self-respecting German woman would cry shame on her and shun her house for ever; that the feeling in Germany against the abominable English is so bitter, because of their brutal methods of warfare and their barbarous ideas of peace (starving hundreds of German children by their infamous blockade, drowning German sailors under the sea in their submarines, burning German airmen alive in the air, and now ruining everybody by crushing demands for reparations which will leave Germany a nation of beggars), that no decent house would shelter any of them.
“Tell your Englishwoman from me that if she marries you and comes to this country she will be as a leper whom nobody will touch. Never shall she cross this threshold! Oskar, my son, I love you, and I have waited all this time for you; I am old, too, and have not much longer to live, but rather than hear you had married an Englishwoman I would see you dead and buried.”
When Mona looks up from the letter, Oskar is gazing into her face with a ghastly smile.