He ignored her preference. “What was the matter with the guy?”
“The whole thing was utterly impossible! Sarah is a mere child. She was even younger when this—this slippery impostor swept her off her feet.”
Jimmie scratched his cheek. “You might as well come clean. I probed Willie Corinth on the subject, and he tapped his wife, Susie, and she didn’t have much. Just that you clipped off Harry like a flower. Pretty nearly everybody in the village liked the lug, at first.”
“I will not discuss it.”
Jimmie grinned. “Sarah’s still in the doghouse with herself about it. She evidently had the big torch in her hand. You know, in some ways, Sarah is pretty mature. And girls have been known to get married-successfully, even-at the age of nineteen, which my nonbenevolent sister is approaching.”
“It was something your father found out,” Mrs. Bailey said, at last. “We never mentioned it. We felt that part was up to Mr. Meade, if anyone. We were only glad that we did find out. We had both been dubious, naturally. The man is a clarinetist. He does have some talent, apparently. And his family is extremely well-to-do. However, what your father learned—”
He was not grinning. “Skeleton in the closet, eh? Was the cluck already married or something?”
She apparently felt that his mood of worry was the best one in which to reveal a matter that would undoubtedly be uncovered sooner or later. Jimmie had a persistence which came, she often said proudly, from her side of the family. She knitted a few stitches as a prologue. “Jimmie, this Mr. Harry Meade is—non-Aryan.”
“Huh!”
“He is one quarter Jewish. Your father found it out on a trip to New York. His family is well known in New York. But his grandmother was a Jewess.”