"She is very shy," said Clowes, framing the word "Tea" with her lips and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:-- "I don't think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl." "Does she give flowers to Mitchell?" he asked furiously, coming at last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind. "Yes," said Clowes. "She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty Finch affair." "Has he told her then?" "Yes." "Why did he tell her?" "I'm sure I don't know." "I'll tell you," cried Mendel. "I'll tell you. To make himself interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about me to excuse himself. Now, hasn't he? . . . I can see by your face that he has." Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers. "Very well, then," Mendel continued; "you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down." "Do please drink your tea," said Clowes. "It is getting cold." Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:-- "I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter." Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic. "Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?" "Her hair?" cried Mendel. "Her beautiful hair?" "Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it." "Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?" "Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly does something you don't expect." "But she must look terrible!" "Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear their hair long, I don't see why the girls shouldn't wear theirs short." "My mother had her head shaved when she married," said he, "and she wore a wig." "Why did she do that?" "It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men." "What a horrible idea!" "It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason for cutting her hair." "When you know Greta, you will know that she doesn't wait for reasons." "Why does she like Mitchell?" "She likes nearly everybody." "But she writes to him."