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They were all over Italy. Italy was welcoming them with both hands, establishing again the economic entente. These were a mother and a backfisch, and they looked shyly and sullenly at Mrs. Hilary and the other English-woman in the compartment. They were thin, and Mrs. Hilary noted it with satisfaction.
I look now upon myself as a real Backfisch, as the Germans call very young girls, and that is simply what I am; and I feel that I ought never to have been allowed to sport about in those fascinating clear waters which reflected no shadows, now that I must go back to the millpond and learn to swim.
We are fond of ours, but there is nothing distinctive about it. As you saw, it is an ordinary London house. We shall easily find another." "So you think." "Again my lack of experience, I suppose!" said Margaret, easing away from the subject. "I can't say anything when you take up that line, Mrs. Wilcox. I wish I could see myself as you see me foreshortened into a backfisch. Quite the ingenue.
Bad habits cling to us, however, with such persistency that I did mechanically pull out my handkerchief and begin to rub off the welcoming smudge, a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in the glorious old days; but an artful scent of violets clinging to the handkerchief brought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of scorn, the fine scorn for scent of every honest Backfisch, I rolled it up into a ball and flung it away into the bushes, where I daresay it is at this moment.
She didn't believe for one moment in starving Germans, but these certainly did not look so prosperous and buxom as a pre-war German mother and backfisch would have looked. They were equally uncivil, though. They pulled both windows up to the top. The two English ladies promptly pulled them down half-way. English ladies are the only beings in the world who like open windows in winter.
She resented the kind of quasi-guardianship that this clever backfisch assumed towards her, though she knew it meant that Nora had fallen in love with her. But it was inconvenient to be so fallen in love with if it was to mean interference with her private affairs. "As if I couldn't protect myself!"
She was at the backfisch age. "What did he mean, Mother, when he said that about Theodore being a great violinist, and its not being fair? What isn't fair? And how did he happen to be in the store, anyway? He bought a heap of toys, didn't he? I suppose he's awfully rich." "To-night, when Theodore's at the concert, I'll tell you what he meant, and all about it."
The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with his cropped head and his outstanding ears, his backfisch waist and his mudscow feet that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offends the roving eye.
Dearman, denying himself champagne at dinner-parties, earning opprobrium as a teetotaller, going to bed early like a bread-and-butter flapper, and generally losing all the joys of Life! Been behaving like a backfisch.
It had now more than the pre-war bitterness; between the combatants flowed rivers of blood; behind them ranked male relatives killed or maimed by the male relatives of their foes on the opposite seat. The English ladies won. Germany was a conquered race, and knew it. In revenge, the backfisch coughed and sneezed "all over the carriage," as Mrs.
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