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She rang a bell and summoned a butler who was also cook, and coachman too. "Show Mr. Ostermoor out," she directed, calm still. But the terms of that order were only out of regard for the extreme age of the servitor. He would attempt to obey her she knew; had he been younger she would have directed that Mr. Ostermoor be thrown out. A week later the estate was settled up.
Fresh, clean straw, when dry, makes a good bed, and no Ostermoor mattress was ever more comfortable. We burrowed into it like moles, and although it rained we had a good day. Waking up in the afternoon, we decided on a general clean-up, and, dipping water from the Weser in a rusty tin pail without a handle, we washed our faces, cleaned our teeth, shaved, and combed our hair.
"You must see my predicament." So spoke Ostermoor. "I'm dependent on the old man. If he cuts me off, and he says he will if "
Yet how easily she read his lameness, and estimated his father's words. Dangerous blood tainted? Ostermoor had feared her tongue; the women in his household talked shrilly and long upon far less provocation. But she only sat and seemed to smile. "I see," was all she said. And while she smiled, her cheeks hot, his eyes had crept over her. Her slenderness was rounded, her slimness soft and full.
Merkle won't take you anywhere, for he's full of distilled water and has a directors' meeting at ten. I overflow with spirits and have a noontide engagement with an Ostermoor." "Why don't you ask Miss Demorest? She came with you?" Wharton sighed hopelessly. "Something queer about that Jane. D'you know what made us so late? She went to mass on the way down." "Mass? At that hour?"
Even callow young Ostermoor, hair slick and scented, a thick-limbed, small-town Brummel confident in his best-clothes smartness, had not had quite the courage to tell her to her uplifted, flushed face what his father had shouted: That he'd have no blood of his crossed with hers; that it was dangerous blood tainted wild. "He says," he finished lamely instead, "it's better to wait."
No doubt they would have been still more impressed had they known that in prosperous times people had fresh rose petals to sleep on every night instead of feather beds or Ostermoor mattresses; that the pigs were fed on roses until their skins grew to be so fine and transparent that they were as clear as wax and the pigs themselves were red, white or yellow or pink, according to the color of the roses they ate; that housewives made rose petals into pies, cakes and candy, and even bread, and stewed them with sugar and lemons for jam.
And the day that Ostermoor Young Ostermoor was his title, though his given name was Howard Davenport broke his never announced and merely tacitly accepted engagement to her they knew great joy. But she robbed them of half their triumph. In public she never dropped her chin. And only Ostermoor and she knew the shame of that private conversation by which they were unplighted.
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