Children of no Man's Land by G.B. Stern

I

Deb was living with La llorraine. She indignantly refused to return home on the understanding that she was to be partially forgiven for an offence she had never committed; on the other hand, her affection for Ferdie caused her a pang of acute misery when she saw how the belief in her sins had stripped him of a certain chubby contentment which even the war and its complications had hitherto left unimpaired. For of course her swift dramatic rupture with her family toppled to an anti-climax. Richard took home the tidings of her whereabouts; and a day after her flight, Aunt Stella appeared at Zoe's for a parley. The tolerance of the period did not permit an erring daughter to be blasted with a parent's curse and left to suicide-or worse-in the dark cold streets of London. The tolerance of the period sanctioned some natural anxiety over the said daughter's material welfare, tentative negotiations, and a return home to a great deal of nagging and an atmosphere of reproachful discomfort. Perhaps Deb foresaw the final inevitable item; perhaps also, her passionate self-persuasion that she could not bear continual witnessing of Ferdie's sighs and worried forehead, was the outcome of a guilty suspicion that it was more by haphazard than by virtue that she was able to mount her pedestal and stand aggrieved upon it.