He was honestly bewildered. “Came here from the club last night? Why—why, I wasn’t so bad.”
Standing away from him, she twirled the engagement solitaire as if resisting the impulse to snatch it off. “That would be a question of point of view, wouldn’t it? If Aunt Marion hadn’t been here––”
“I’d only had––”
“Please, Rash! I don’t want to know the details.”
“But I want you to know them. I’ve told you a dozen times that if I take so much as a cocktail or a glass of sherry I’m all in, when another fellow can take ten times as much and not––”
“Rash, dear, I haven’t known you all my life without being quite aware that you’re excitable. ‘Crazy Rash’ we used to call you when we were children, and Crazy Rash you are still. But that’s not my point.”
“Your point is that that infernal old Aunt Marion of yours doesn’t like me.”
“She’s not infernal, and she’s not old, but it’s true that she doesn’t like you. All the more reason, then, that when she gave her consent to our engagement on condition that you’d give up your disgusting habits––”
He raced away from her to the other side of the room, turning to face her like an exasperated animal at bay.
The room was noteworthy, and of curiously feminine refinement. Expressing Miss Marion Walbrook as it did, it made no provision for the coarse and 5 lounging habits of men, Miss Walbrook’s world being a woman’s world. All was straight, slender, erect, and hard in the way that women like for occasions of formality. It was evident, too, that Miss Walbrook’s women friends were serious, if civilized. There was no place here for the slapdash, smoking girl of the present day.