“Billy, how can you?”
“Listen to me, Caroline, honey love, it will be all right. Nancy isn’t so crazy as she seems. She is running wild a little, I admit, but there’s no danger of the sheriff or any other disaster. She knows what she’s doing, and she’s playing safe, though I admit it’s an extraordinary game.”
“She’s unhappy,” Caroline said. “You don’t suppose she’s going to marry Dick to get out of the scrape, and that she’s suffering because she’s had to make that compromise.”
“No, I don’t,” said Billy.
“I can’t imagine anything more dreadful than to give up your career—your independence because you were beaten before you could demonstrate it.”
“Let’s go right in here,” Billy said, guiding her by the arm through the door of the grill of the Café des Artistes which she was ignoring in her absorption.
It was early but the place was already crowded with the assortment of upper cut Bohemians, Frenchmen, and other discriminating diners to whom the café owed its vogue. Billy and Caroline found a snowy table by the window, a table so small that it scarcely seemed to separate them.
“If it’s Dick that Nancy’s depending on,” Caroline shook out her mammoth napkin vigorously, “then I think the whole situation is dreadful.”
“I don’t see why,” Billy argued; “have him to fall back on—that’s what men are for.”