“Give me your mother’s address,”
she demanded.
“Certainly not.”
“You absolutely refuse to save yourself?”
“From what? From Peter? There are
many worse people than Peter to save myself from,
Mrs. Boyer—uncharitable people, and—and
cruel people.”
Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
“Meaning me!” she retorted. “My
dear child, people are always cruel who try to save
us from ourselves.”
Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna’s specious
arguments must pop into her head at that instant and
demand expression.
“People are living their own lives these days,
Mrs. Boyer; old standards have gone. It is what
one’s conscience condemns that is wrong, isn’t
it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to
fit the average, not the exception.”
Anna! Anna!
Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
“You are impossible!” she snapped.
“After all, I believe it is Peter who needs
protection! I shall speak to him.”
She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting
volley.
“And just a word of advice: Perhaps the
old standards have gone. But if you really expect
to find a respectable woman to chaperon you,
keep your views to yourself.”
Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy’s
room and sank on her knees beside the bed. One
small hand lay on the coverlet; she dared not touch
it for fear of waking him—but she laid
her cheek close to it for comfort. When Peter
came in, much later, he found the boy wide awake and
Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
“I think she’s been crying,” Jimmy
whispered. “She’s been sobbing in
her sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may
be more mice.”
Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the
Doctors’ Club. It was typical of the way
things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should
be Dr. Jennings. Young McLean was in the reading
room, eating his heart out with jealousy of Peter,
vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that
night and fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently
if he made the attempt. He had found a picture
of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a magazine,
and was sitting with it open before him. Very
deeply and really in love was McLean that afternoon,
and the Fraulein Engel and Harmony were not unlike.
The double doors between the reading room and the
reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost
in a rosy future in which he and Harmony sat together
for indefinite periods, with no Peter to scowl over
his books at them, a future in which life was one
long piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier
going out one by one, leaving them at last alone in
scented darkness together—McLean heard nothing
until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused
him.
