Surveying Erica’s relationship to Marc from the standpoint of community of tastes and interests and similarity of viewpoint and background-above all, similarity of background, since it is the background which gives rise to the viewpoint-and convinced as she was that you cannot be "genuinely" in love with a man whom you have only known for a period of weeks, rather than months, Margaret Drake could not bring herself to regard it as anything but an infatuation.
Charles Drake was under no such delusions, and in this respect, his conduct was considerably less justifiable than that of his wife. If he had regarded it as an infatuation, he would have let it run its course, and trusted Erica to come to her senses in time to prevent her from taking any final step on the strength of it, but as a matter of fact, he knew Erica too well to imagine that she was capable of being infatuated with anyone.
It was precisely because he realized how much Marc meant to her that he did everything in his power to get rid of him. In the end, unlike his wife, he could not plead ignorance; he could not say as Margaret Drake was to say in sheer despair, after Marc had finally gone home, "Erica, I didn’t know-I didn’t know!"
Charles Drake had known, as he generally did, from the very beginning. His only excuse was self-defense, for in trying to defend Erica, he was defending not her interests, but his conception of her interests.
The change in tactics came without warning so far as Erica was concerned, except for Miriam’s statement that her parents had decided to stay in town because they were too worried to derive any benefit from their much-needed holiday.
The morning after Marc and Erica had crossed the river to Ile Bizard by the cable ferry, her father asked Erica suddenly if she was going to be in to dinner the following night.
"No, I don’t think so", said Erica.
"Who are you going out with? René?"
Once before he had asked her if she were going out with René when he already knew she was not.
"I haven’t seen him for weeks".
"So even René is getting the short end of it. Do you mind telling me who you are going out with?"
"Yes, Marc Reiser".
"Weren’t you out with him last night, Erica?" asked her mother.
"Rather overdoing it, isn’t he?" said Charles.
"He isn’t going to be here much longer…".
"Oh, I don’t know", interrupted her father. "We’ve been at war three years and he seems to have managed pretty well so far".
"You don’t know anything about it, Charles", said Erica expressionlessly. She had reached the stage where nothing he said about Marc could make her angry, which, she thought, was simply so much the worse for them both. "It isn’t his fault that he was posted to a reinforcement unit and just told to mark time at Divisional Headquarters until…" Erica stopped. Neither of them, as usual, appeared to be listening; her father’s eyes were back on his newspaper and her mother was pouring a second cup of coffee for Miriam, who opened her mouth to say something, glanced at Erica, and then subsided, muttering resignedly, "O.K., darling, have it your own way".
Erica said at last, looking down at her plate, "I thought you wanted to know why Marc and I are seeing so much of each other".
"We already know that without being told". Her father made an effort to read a little further, obviously thoroughly depressed, then with an exclamation he suddenly put down his paper, got up and left the room.
From then on, any direct or indirect reference to Marc always produced the same result. It wasn’t what they said, for they rarely said anything, but the way they looked. Whenever they knew that Erica was on her way to meet Marc somewhere or had just come back from meeting him, the moment she entered the room, that look would settle down over their faces. It was apparently necessary that she should not go out the front door under any illusion that they would be enjoying themselves while she was with Marc, and when she returned home, it was equally necessary that she should realize that it was they who were paying for any happiness she might have had from her dinner, or her drive or whatever it was. The look was not in any way put on; it was a matter of simple fact that they did not and could not enjoy themselves when they knew Erica was with Marc, and that her happiness, such as it was, was purchased at their expense, and they made no effort to conceal it, that was all.
Erica lived with that look from the beginning of August until the middle of September when Marc went home, back to his own people, and she finally broke down. She never got used to it, and up to the very end, it still required an effort of will before she could force herself to enter a room and face it.
The indirect attack on Marc started a few nights later at dinner. It did not amount to very much; Charles Drake had lunched that day with a dollar-a-year man on the Wartime Prices and Trade Board who had told him that the most persistent violators of the price ceiling were the Jews, particularly the Jewish clothing firms who were so universally determined to beat the Government that there would have been no particular risk involved in arresting every Jewish clothier first and taking the chance of being able to secure enough evidence for the conviction of each of them individually, afterwards. "The Jews" had no sense of responsibility and regarding themselves as outside the community, for some reason or other, you simply could not make them realize that what affected the community as a whole would ultimately affect them to the same extent as everyone else.
Since she had heard it all before from various other people, and had grown up in a society in which almost everyone threw off derogatory remarks about "The Jews", often from sheer force of habit, Erica would probably not have attached any particular significance to her father’s remarks if he had not rather gone out of his way to avoid all unflattering references to Jews, as such, until now. He was too imaginative ever to be accidentally tactless and since he himself bracketed Marc with Jews in general, until now he had preferred to stay off the subject altogether.
Erica was out the following night. The night after that it was something about "The Jews" safeguarding themselves against the inflation for which their own conduct would be partly responsible, by buying up all the available real estate.
At breakfast a day or so later, it was the old story of fire insurance; in a slightly different form, however. The previous night he had been playing bridge at his club with the president of an insurance company who had remarked in the course of a discussion about the Jews, that Jews and fires always went together, and that if you wanted to find the Jewish districts in any given city, all you had to do was look at the nearest insurance company map for the heaviest concentration of fires. In fact they were such a bad risk that a good many companies preferred not to sell them fire insurance, with the result that a group of Jews who were angered by the discrimination against them had got together and started an insurance company of their own, only to go broke in short order. The richest part of it was that these same Jews would now sell fire insurance only to Gentiles.
The maps were something new so far as Erica was concerned, but the Jewish company which refused to insure other Jews against fire was not. She had often wondered if it really existed.
There was a curious, very faint deliberateness in the way her father went about it, a barely perceptible change of expression and a barely audible change in his voice, so that she always knew when he was going to start, and tried to steel herself against what was coming. She had an odd feeling that to allow herself to be hurt by it, would be to fall into the same fundamental error as her father-the error of identifying the characteristics of the individual with the usually misrepresented characteristics of the group.