The exclamation was explosive enough to catch the ear of an extremely pretty young woman who stood near by with her hands in her pockets. She wore a Burberry raglan and an entirely untrimmed soft felt hat, and she came over unceremoniously and joined the group.
"Miss Devereux," said the author, with hard-fetched irony, "here's a chorus-girl in perfect agreement with you. She's got about six lines to say, and she wants to change two of them."
"What are your changes, Dane?" Galbraith asked.
Queerly enough, the curt seriousness of his speech was immensely grateful to her—suggested that she perhaps hadn't been, wholly anyhow, the object of his derision before.
"I only thought," said Rose, "that if instead of saying, 'My gracious, Sylvia!' I said, 'Sylvia, dear!' or something like that, it would sound a little more natural. And if I said, 'I do wish, Sylvia' instead of, 'I wish to goodness, Sylvia ...'"
She had said it all straight to the author.
"I suppose," he said, sneering very hard, "that your own personal knowledge of the way society women talk is what leads you to believe that your phrases are better than mine?"
"Yes," said Rose, serenely matter-of-fact, "it is."
Sarcasm is an uncertain sort of pop-gun. You never can tell from which end it's going to go off.
"I don't know," said Miss Devereux, turning now a deadly smile on him, "whether Miss—what's-her-name—agrees with me or not. But, do you know, I agree with her."