"Would you mind her knowing?" persisted the girl.
"Why on earth should I?" demanded Vane with a look of blank surprise.
She took a few strokes, and then rested on her oars again. "There are people," she said calmly, "who consider I'm the limit—a nasty, fast hussy. . . ."
"What appalling affectation on your part," jeered Vane lighting his pipe. "What do you do to keep up your reputation—sell flags in Leicester Square on flag days?" The girl's attention seemed to be concentrated on a patch of reeds where a water-hen was becoming vociferous. "Or do you pursue the line taken up by a woman I met last time I was on leave? She was a Wraf or a Wren or something of that kind, and at the time she was in mufti. But to show how up to date she was she had assimilated the jargon, so to speak, of the mechanics she worked with. It almost gave me a shock when she said to me in a confidential aside at a mutual friend's house, 'Have you ever sat down to a more perfectly bloody tea?'"
"I think," said Joan with her eyes still fixed on the reeds, "that that is beastly. It's not smart, and it does not attract men . . ."
"You're perfectly right there," returned Vane, grimly. "However, arising out of that remark, is your whole object in life to attract men?"
"Of course it is. It's the sole object of nine women out of ten. Why ask such absurd questions?"
"I sit rebuked," murmured Vane. "But to return—in what way do your charitable friends consider you the limit?"
"I happen to be natural," said Joan, "and at times that's very dangerous. I'm not the sort of natural, you know, that loves cows and a country life, and gives the chickens their hard-boiled eggs, or whatever they eat, at five in the morning."
"But you like Blandford," said Vane incautiously.