And Delilah,
who had shorn the locks of so many Samsons, and who had heard so many
secrets, gave ear with a clever affectation of interested surprise that
deceived these gay deceivers and set them high on the peaks of their own
estimation. Two or three family parties, one obviously French, seemed out
of place, indecently domestic in the midst of such a throng, in which
matrimony was a Cinderella before the ball, cuffed in curl-papers rather
than kissed in crystal slippers. They sat rather silent. One consisted of
a father, a mother and two daughters, the latter in large flowered hats.
The father smoked. The mother looked furtive in a bonnet, and the two
daughters, with wide open eyes, examined the flirtations around them as a
child examines a butterfly caught in a net. One of them blushed. But she
did not turn away her eyes. Nor were her girlish ears inactive. Family
life seemed suddenly to become dull to her. She wondered whether it were
life at all. And the father still smoked domestically. He knew it all.
That was the difference. And perhaps it was his knowledge that made him
serenely content with domesticity and the three women who belonged to
him. Two boys, who had come up from a public school for the race, and had
forgotten to go back, sat at the end of a row in glistening white collars
and neat ties, almost angrily observant of all that was going on around
them.
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