“I mean careful not to get me mixed up,” she said. “Careful not to mix up the girl you might hear somebody talking about with the me I honestly try to make you see. If you do get those two mixed up—well, the whole show'll be spoiled!”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because it's——” She checked herself, having begun to speak too impulsively; and she was disturbed, realizing in what tricky stuff she dealt. What had been on her lips to say was, “Because it's happened before!” She changed to, “Because it's so easy to spoil anything—easiest of all to spoil anything that's pleasant.”
“That might depend.”
“No; it's so. And if you care at all about—about knowing a girl who'd like someone to know her——”
“Just 'someone?' That's disappointing.”
“Well—you,” she said.
“Tell me how 'careful' you want me to be, then!”
“Well, don't you think it would be nice if you didn't give anybody the chance to talk about me the way—the way I've just been talking about Henrietta Lamb?”
With that they laughed together, and he said, “You may be cutting me off from a great deal of information, you know.”