OU_214051 UNIVERSA - Osmania University

A CRIME IN HOLLAND 213
The professor's only answer was a sulky look.
" So you spoke in that vein for three-quarters of an hour,
illustrating your points with striking examples. You quoted Lornbroso
and a host of others, finishing up with Freud."
He looked at his watch and, speaking to the row of seated people
who represented the audience, said:
" I must ask you to wait just a few minutes more."
The moment was chosen for one of the children to set up a howl.
Her mother, whose nerves were on the stretch, shook her to make
her keep quiet. As that didn't work, her father took her on his
knee and tried coaxing. That didn't work either, so he pinched
her arm.
You had to look at the empty chair between Any and Beetje
to realize that, after all, something serious was going on. And even
then—wasn't it all rather a common-place affair? Was Beetje with
her healthy but insipidly pretty face worth all the trouble she had
caused ?
The bleak and feeble light had the virtue of showing up the
naked truth, by destroying all the glow and glamour that generally
concealed it. It did its work very effectively with Beetje. Insipidly
pretty, was she? Hardly that. What had she, then, that entitled her
to play a star's part in the drama? To put it crudely, she had two
things; and two things only: two fine round buxom breasts that
were sufficiently outlined by her silk blouse to make them all the
more alluring. Eighteen-year-old breasts in which the slightest
quiver made them seem palpitating with life.
A little beyond her, Madame Popinga, who neither now nor at
eighteen ever had such breasts as those. Madame Popinga dressed
in layer upon layer of sober clothing which was not in bad taste
but rather in no taste at all.
And Any, angular, ugly, flat-chested, whose only piquancy lay
in being enigmatic.
Popinga had had the ill luck to cross Beetje's path, Popinga the
bon vivant, a seafaring man who'd come home to roost too soon,
who still had a sweet tooth for the world's more sensuous pleasures.
Had he ever really looked at Beetje's face and her glassy, china-blue
eyes? If he had, he had certainly not seen behind it, seen the grappling-irons
she had ready to hook on to any man who could take
her off somewhere—anywhere that wasn't Delfzijl.
He had merely glanced at the rest. All his eyes had really rested
on was that young, seductive, supple body. . . .